Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres 3030750272, 9783030750275

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Editors and Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: It Begins with the Theatre: Barrie Kosky´s Workshop
Introduction
It Begins with the Theatre
It Begins with the Theatre
It Begins with the Theatre
Structure and Contents
References
Chapter 2: ``Very Much a Laboratory´´: Barrie Kosky and the Gilgul Ensemble 1991-1997
Establishment of the Gilgul Ensemble
Works Produced 1991-1997
Dramaturgical and Compositional Processes
Stage Language
Object-Based Theatre
The Ritual of Objects
Audience and Critical Responses
Context and Influences: Performance Tendencies in the 1990s
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: ``Aesthetic Ideas´´: Mystery and Meaning in the Early Work of Barrie Kosky
Introduction: Narrative and Spectacle
Kosky´s Early Aesthetic
Aesthetic Contrasts as a Language of Opera
Kosky´s Aesthetic Ideas: Through the Looking Glass
References
Chapter 4: Something for Everybody? Art, Community, the Unfamiliar, and Barrie Kosky at the Adelaide Festival
The Adelaide Festival of Arts
Setting the Scene for Kosky´s 1996 Adelaide Festival
Kosky´s Telstra Adelaide Festival 96
Something for Everyone?
References
Chapter 5: Dramaturgies of Repetition and the Denial of Catharsis: Traumatic Breaking Points in Barrie Kosky´s Approach to Cha...
Catharsis, Trauma, Repetition
The Lost Echo
Character and Postdramatic Theatre: Irruptions and Divergences
The Women of Troy
King Lear
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: When All Else Fails, Sing: Barrie Kosky´s The Women of Troy
Kosky and Music
Speech and Song
Beautiful Music
The Lone Piano
References
Chapter 7: Barrie Kosky´s Grotesques and the Ecstasy of Theatre
References
Chapter 8: ``Es klang so alt und war doch so neu´´: Barrie Kosky and Wagner´s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Background
Is Beckmesser Jewish?
Staging Die Meistersinger
Katharina Wagner
Barrie Kosky Puts Wagner on Trial
The Ending of Die Meistersinger
References
Chapter 9: (Not) Repeating the Past in Barrie Kosky´s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Setting and Unsettling the Scene: Overture and Beginners
Whose Nuremberg(s)?
Richard Defends Himself
References
Appendix: Selected Productions by Barrie Kosky
Index

Citation preview

Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues Series Editors: Benjamin Nickl · Irina Herrschner · Elżbieta M. Goździak

James Phillips John R. Severn Editors

Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres

Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues Series Editors Benjamin Nickl, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Irina Herrschner, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Elżbieta M. Goździak, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Washington, DC, USA

Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues presents original research work from contributors in a cutting-edge collection of case and monograph studies in humanities, business, economics, law, education, cultural studies and science. It offers concise yet in-depth overviews of contemporary ties between Germany and nations in flux, such as Afghanistan, Korea, and Israel, as well as societies with longstanding ties to the Federal Republic. It serves as an arena for both scholars and practitioners to apply comparative and interconnected research outcomes connected to topics such as educational policies, Muslimness, refugee integration, nation branding and digital societies to other transnational contexts. This series is an interdisciplinary project to offer a fresh look at Germany’s relations to other countries in the 21st century. The bilateral concept is anchored in a renewed interest in Germany’s innovative stance on identity politics, fiscal policies, civil law and national cultures. The series caters to a renewed interest in transnational studies and the actors working across the boundaries of nation states.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15756

James Phillips • John R. Severn Editors

Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres

Editors James Phillips School of Humanities and Languages University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia

John R. Severn Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISSN 2522-5324 ISSN 2522-5332 (electronic) Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues ISBN 978-3-030-75027-5 ISBN 978-3-030-75028-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Anton Thomas 2017 This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Our first thanks go to our contributors, with whom it has been a stimulating pleasure to collaborate. Much of their work was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, with its lockdowns and closures of theatres, libraries, and archives, has made academic theatre research a challenge. However, neither this nor the arrival of two babies, a move from one continent to another, illness, responsibility for a major university restructuring, abrupt losses of income, and sudden changes in job responsibilities deterred them from engaging with our requests, queries, and discussions or from delivering their manuscripts on time. We admire as well as appreciate their commitment and perseverance. While the pandemic has had an impact in one way or another on everyone, Australia has been spared its worst effects. Unfortunately, some of our colleagues in Germany who had initially planned to be part of the volume were unable to for COVID-19-related and other reasons. This volume began with papers and discussions at a joint conference on Theatre and Internationalization and Barrie Kosky: Past, Present, Future that John organized with Ulrike Garde in Sydney in 2019. Some of the chapters in this volume began life as papers at this conference and other contributors joined us afterwards. The conference was jointly hosted by Macquarie University and the Goethe-Institut Australia and included a public discussion panel. Thanks are due to the GoetheInstitut Australia, especially Sonja Griegoschewski, Director, and Jochen Gutsch, Cultural Program Co-ordinator, Sydney, for their zealous support and assistance and for arranging for the public showing of Felix von Boehm’s documentary Monsieur Butterfly: Barrie Kosky; to Elena Kats-Chernin, Barrie Kosky’s composer collaborator on their Monteverdi Trilogie at the Komische Oper Berlin for agreeing to appear on the public discussion forum and sharing her experience on working on these operas; to Ulrich Lenz of the Komische Oper Berlin for sharing a showreel of Barrie Kosky’s work there; to Jan Zwar and her team at the Research Office of the Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University for assistance with conference planning, and also for making connections with others interested in Kosky and the work of the Komische Oper Berlin. Thanks especially to Ulrike Garde for her enthusiasm and support for this and the wider Kosky project. v

vi

Acknowledgments

John has presented conference papers and talks on aspects of Barrie Kosky’s work in Macquarie University’s International Studies Research Seminar series, the Macquarie University Research Fellowship Showcase, the University of Sydney’s German Studies Research Seminar series, at the Media Journeys 2019: Looking Back, Stepping Forward conference in Norwich, UK, at the 2019 Modern Languages Association conference in Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Australia Council. Many thanks to all who contributed feedback and discussions at these, shaping his research on Barrie Kosky’s work. Thanks also to his Theatre Studies students at the University of New South Wales, particularly in Theories of Acting and Performing, and his Political Dramaturgy students at the University of Wollongong for their willingness to engage with Barrie Kosky and the Komische Oper Berlin. At Macquarie University, thanks to the third-year German Studies students in courses on Berlin and on intercultural perspectives on Germany for their keenness and curiosity about Barrie Kosky’s work at the Komische Oper Berlin and to the first-year European Studies students for throwing themselves into the mostly unfamiliar territory of opera and jazz operetta as creators and destabilizers of national and transnational cultures and identities and for the interesting discussions that ensued. We are grateful for the assistance and access to resources provided by the librarians at Macquarie University, the University of New South Wales, the State Library of New South Wales, the State Library of South Australia, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the library of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and the National Library of Scotland. Thanks also to Drew Young at the Edinburgh International Festival for arranging viewings of recordings of Barrie Kosky’s work for the Edinburgh Festival. Two theatre archivists—a rare species these days—deserve particular thanks: Judith Seeff at the Sydney Theatre Company, who provided access to recordings of Barrie Kosky’s STC work as well as scripts, scores, and other material and Claudia Funder at the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne, home of the Barrie Kosky Collection, a remarkable set of material relating to Barrie Kosky’s whole career that is an invaluable resource for anyone working on his work. Both Judith’s and Claudia’s helpfulness and knowledgeability are appreciated not only by us, but by several contributors throughout the book. Special thanks to the Komische Oper Berlin for providing us with recordings of their productions, among other things. Many thanks to Ulrich Lenz, Head Dramaturg, Adrian Strooper, tenor, and Barrie Kosky himself for interviews and discussions. Particular thanks to Rainer Simon for providing information for the list of Barrie Kosky’s productions in the Appendix to this volume, for answering queries so quickly, and for generally being a pleasure to work with. Both of us are grateful for the opportunity to spend several extended periods abroad as a result of our institutions’ research schemes, which have allowed us to follow Barrie Kosky’s work in Europe since 2007, whether as a direct aim or an indirect result of our research. James wishes to thank the University of New South Wales Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme, which brought him to Sydney in 2006 in time for The Lost Echo, Barrie Kosky’s eight-hour production for the Sydney Theatre Company. He also thanks the Australia Research Council for the

Acknowledgments

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fellowship (2007–2011) during which he was able to catch a number of Kosky shows in Europe. The University of New South Wales’s study leave program enabled two subsequent research trips to Germany and the chance for further theatregoing. Most of John’s research was funded by the Macquarie University Research Fellowship, including research trips to archives in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Edinburgh as well as theatre-based research in Germany and Switzerland. The latter stages of the book were completed as part of John’s collaboration on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project on “The Economic and Cultural Value of Theatre in Australia” at Macquarie University, led by Distinguished Professor David Throsby. At Springer, we would like to thank Shinjini Chatterjee as well as our commissioning editors, Ben Nickl and Irina Herrschner for championing the project. Finally, thanks to Barrie Kosky himself. James first encountered his work in 1993 with Oedipus Rex in Brisbane and then introduced John to it with Poppea at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007. Since then, Barrie Kosky’s productions have continued to provoke and engage us. Our hope is that with this volume we have succeeded in putting into words a little of what has stirred and leapt in us and our contributors over the years.

Contents

1

It Begins with the Theatre: Barrie Kosky’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . James Phillips and John R. Severn

2

“Very Much a Laboratory”: Barrie Kosky and the Gilgul Ensemble 1991–1997 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yoni Prior and Matt Delbridge

31

“Aesthetic Ideas”: Mystery and Meaning in the Early Work of Barrie Kosky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer A. McMahon

59

Something for Everybody? Art, Community, the Unfamiliar, and Barrie Kosky at the Adelaide Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John R. Severn

81

3

4

1

5

Dramaturgies of Repetition and the Denial of Catharsis: Traumatic Breaking Points in Barrie Kosky’s Approach to Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Charlotte Farrell

6

When All Else Fails, Sing: Barrie Kosky’s The Women of Troy . . . . . 123 Mara Davis

7

Barrie Kosky’s Grotesques and the Ecstasy of Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . 137 James Phillips

8

“Es klang so alt und war doch so neu”: Barrie Kosky and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Michael J. Halliwell

ix

x

Contents

9

(Not) Repeating the Past in Barrie Kosky’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 John R. Severn

Appendix: Selected Productions by Barrie Kosky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from Monash University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford University Press 2005), The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford University Press 2007), and Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle (Oxford University Press 2019) as well as the editor of Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (Stanford University Press 2008). He has published widely on theatre, cinema, literature, aesthetics, and political philosophy, and he is the translator of Alexander García Düttmann’s Philosophy of Exaggeration (Continuum 2007) and Christoph Menke’s Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett (Columbia University Press 2009). His current research project is a book-length study on the politics of spectacle in the musicals of Busby Berkeley. John R. Severn is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney where he collaborates on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the economic and cultural value of theatre in Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Theatre from the University of New South Wales, an MA in Shakespeare and Theatre from the University of Birmingham, and separate First-Class Honours degrees in Theatre Studies and in Opera Studies from the University of Manchester/Rose Bruford College. He also has an LLB with Honours in Law and French from the University of Edinburgh and a previous career in law. He has taught Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong and International Studies at Macquarie University. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical (Routledge 2019) and co-editor with Ulrike Garde of Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (Routledge 2021). From 2017 to 2020, he was a Macquarie University Research Fellow with a project entitled “Beyond Cultural Borders: Barrie Kosky’s Rethinking of Community in xi

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Editors and Contributors

Artistic and Practical Terms”. His wider research covers adaptation, opera, musical theatre, and community, and he is currently preparing a monograph on opera and adaptation.

Contributors Mara Davis University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia Matt Delbridge Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Charlotte Farrell Sydney, NSW, Australia Michael J. Halliwell The University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, NSW, Australia Jennifer A. McMahon The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia James Phillips School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia Yoni Prior University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia John R. Severn Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.3

Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 1.7 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4

Orpheus (Dominik Köninger) and puppet, from Monteverdi Trilogie: Orpheus, directed by Barrie Kosky for the Komische Oper Berlin. Screengrab from 2013 DVD recording, Arthaus Musik 109,078 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Fool as Shirley Temple as diva. Louise Fox and Lear’s Dog-Knights in King Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky for Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company. Photograph Jeff Busby. Australia Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saul (Christopher Purves) apparently gives birth to the Witch of Endor (John Graham-Hall) in Saul, directed by Barrie Kosky. Screengrab from the DVD recording of the 2015 Glyndebourne production, Opus Arte OA 1216 D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Witch of Endor (John Graham-Hall) suckles Saul (Christopher Purves) in Saul, directed by Barrie Kosky. Screengrab from the DVD recording of the 2015 Glyndebourne production, Opus Arte OA 1216 D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (dir. Josef von Sternberg, Paramount Pictures, 1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paula Murrihy in Carmen (dir. Barrie Kosky, Oper Frankfurt, 2016). Photo credit: Oper Frankfurt/Monika Rittershaus . . . . . . . . . . Stolpersteine commemorating Jewish victims of the Nazi regime outside the Komische Oper Berlin. © John R. Severn . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barrie Kosky directing The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: John Gollings. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Es Brent. 1992 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Levad. 1993 Image: Jeff Busby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2

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3

4 15 15 21 32 36 36 37 xiii

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Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9

Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11 Fig. 2.12 Fig. 2.13 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

List of Figures

The Wilderness Room, 1995 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise .. . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . The Operated Jew. 1997 Image: John Gollings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rehearsing The Wilderness Room 1995 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Es Brent. 1993 Set after mid-performance construction Image: John Gollings. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Es Brent. 1993 Image: John Gollings. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Levad. 1993 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Operated Jew. 1997 Image: John Gollings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slide, colour transparency of performer in Exile Trilogy—The Dybbuk, by Gilgul Theatre Company in association with Belvoir St Theatre Company B, at Eveleigh Railway Yards, 1993. Depicts performer Yoni Prior standing in the spotlight with fists raised and wearing a long gown. Photographed by John Gollings. ©John Gollings. Photograph from the Peter Corrigan archives, courtesy Imogen Ross and Kristen Anderson, 2010 who gifted the images to the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colour transparency slide of Deborah Mailman as Cordelia, John Bell as King Lear and Melita Jurisic as Goneril in King Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky, Bell Shakespeare Company, 1998. Photograph by Jeff Busby. The Canberra Theatre Centre, 21 August 1998. © Jeff Busby Image provided and owned by Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slide, colour transparency of performance of Exile Trilogy—The Dybbuk, by Gilgul Theatre Company in association with Belvoir St Theatre Company B, at Town Hall Motors, St Kilda, Melbourne, 1993. Depicts the exterior of a building with four performers lined up on a stage in front of it. The performers are Tom Wright, Yoni Prior, Michael Kantor and Elisa Gray. Set and costume design by Peter Corrigan. Photographed by John Gollings. ©John Gollings. Photograph from the Peter Corrigan archives, courtesy Imogen Ross and Kristen Anderson, 2010 who gifted the images to the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38 38 39 41

42 46 47 49 56

63

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5

Fig. 9.6

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self Portrait as Soldier, 1915. Oil on canvas, 27.2
24 in (69.2
60.9 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Charles F. Olney Fund, 1950. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Studio floor used by Jackson Pollock at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, New York. By Rhododendrites—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid¼44204608 . . Overlapping branches showing high density fractal patterns. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Art Anderson. By Art Anderson, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid¼52771127 . .. . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . .. . Male and female chorus members raise their skirts in Orpheus in the Underworld (dir. Barrie Kosky, Salzburg Festival 2019). Screengrab from Unitel/ORF/ZDF/Arte DVD . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . John Shrimpton and Martin Blum in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Lost Echo, 2006, by Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright. Photo: © Tania Kelley/Copyright Agency, 2021 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard (Michael Volle) shows off his new boots as Hermann Levi (Johannes Martin Kränzle) holds the dogs, Molly and Marke in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . Richard tests one of his new perfumes in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . The youngest Richard emerges from the grand piano in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . An uncanny family grouping of multiple Richards in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . David/Young Richard (Daniel Behle) holds up his boot while Walther/Young Richard (Klaus Florian Vogt) watches in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . David/Young Richard and Walther/Young Richard test perfumes in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. .

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Fig. 9.7

Fig. 9.8

Fig. 9.9

Fig. 9.10

Fig. 9.11

List of Figures

Veit Pogner (Günther Groissböck) emerges from the grand piano in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . Beckmesser/Hermann Levi has an antisemitic caricature puppet head placed on him in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beckmesser/Hermann Levi sits below a gigantic inflatable version of his puppet head in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard takes the witness stand in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . Richard calls German music as his witness in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450 . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. .

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Chapter 1

It Begins with the Theatre: Barrie Kosky’s Workshop James Phillips

and John R. Severn

Abstract We begin this chapter by considering what makes a production recognisably a Barrie Kosky production. We then frame Kosky’s work as transnational, not only in terms of bringing together influences and personnel from different national cultures on stage, but of throwing the nation into question and exposing the transnational within the national, off stage as well as on. We set this engagement with the transnational in the context of a dominant strand of German theatre history that saw theatre as a means of shaping the nation, and also within an oftenoverlooked strand of Australian theatre history. We then discuss the practical steps that the Komische Oper Berlin has taken under Kosky’s leadership to engage with multicultural Berlin, and the ways in which Kosky invites his audiences to continue to engage with the themes raised in his productions after the theatre event, whether through reflection and processing or practical action. We end with a description of the book’s structure and content.

Introduction What makes a production recognisably a Barrie Kosky production? Puppets and giant papier-mâché heads? (Fig. 1.1) A mayhem-in-underpants aesthetic; showgirls and chorus boys in sequins and feathers; camp frivolity? Confronting onstage violence; images of sickening depravity? The answer of course depends on one’s exposure to Barrie Kosky’s work as well as one’s expectation and attitudes towards it. Indeed, the answer might be “all of the above”. With the feathered and sequined showboys and showgirls at the auto-da-fé in his Candide, or the scene in his The Lost

J. Phillips School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] J. R. Severn (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_1

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Fig. 1.1 Orpheus (Dominik Köninger) and puppet, from Monteverdi Trilogie: Orpheus, directed by Barrie Kosky for the Komische Oper Berlin. Screengrab from 2013 DVD recording, Arthaus Musik 109,078

Echo in which the entire cast appears in bell-shaped dresses with feathered hems and headdresses, signing in Auslan, Australia’s sign language, to a rhythmical version of Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth” as Philomela, raped and her tongue cut out, becomes increasingly distressed, one of the things that Barrie Kosky has taught us is that the combination of violence and showbusiness razzmatazz can be emotionally devastating. However, while these aspects might be good guides to the fact that we are watching a Barrie Kosky production, they are not present in all—or indeed even in many—of his productions. We might add a more general clue: the presence of vivid and memorable stage imagery—the witch Ježibaba butchering the water nymph Rusalka with surgical tools to remove her fish-bone skeleton and turn her into a human; Goliath’s gigantic head lying before a sumptuous eighteenth-century feast in Saul; pigs in suits and on stilts in The Fair at Sorochyntsi; King Lear’s Fool dressed as Shirley Temple performing a show-stopping “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” alongside a chorus of man-dogs (Fig. 1.2); Poppea and Nero singing, in a gravelly-toned rendition of one of the most beautiful duets of all opera, of how they gaze at each other, embrace each other and knot themselves around each other, all the while sitting motionless on their separate thrones, dead-eyed, staring straight out, the stage littered with the dead bodies that are the price of their love and Poppea’s crown; Saul apparently giving birth to the aged Witch of Endor (Fig. 1.3), who then proceeds to suckle her father-mother (Fig. 1.4). If we are familiar with Kosky’s opera and operetta productions, we might also cite the prominence of acting and movement in an art form that often privileges the voice above all. This was particularly noticeable in Saul, Kosky’s stage adaptation of an

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Fig. 1.2 The Fool as Shirley Temple as diva. Louise Fox and Lear’s Dog-Knights in King Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky for Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company. Photograph Jeff Busby. Australia Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Fig. 1.3 Saul (Christopher Purves) apparently gives birth to the Witch of Endor (John GrahamHall) in Saul, directed by Barrie Kosky. Screengrab from the DVD recording of the 2015 Glyndebourne production, Opus Arte OA 1216 D

oratorio for the concert hall. With brilliant effect, Kosky staged arias in ways that invited the audience to focus not just on the emotions of the character singing, but on their effects on other people. As a result, a musical solo in the score becomes a performance duet, trio or quartet for a singer and silent performers, while chorus

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Fig. 1.4 The Witch of Endor (John Graham-Hall) suckles Saul (Christopher Purves) in Saul, directed by Barrie Kosky. Screengrab from the DVD recording of the 2015 Glyndebourne production, Opus Arte OA 1216 D

numbers became complex character studies for a singing chorus and silent principals. This concern with the importance of acting and movement in opera stretches back to Kosky’s early days in Melbourne. When interviewed to discuss her role as Thea in Kosky’s production of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden for Melbourne’s 1987 Spoleto Festival, mezzosoprano Jeannie Marsh described working with Kosky as a constant source of excitement for everyone. “Barrie has selected seven singers who are prepared to give anything a go and he is going hell for leather” . . . Marsh, who has been swimming regularly to prepare for her role, revels in the post-rehearsal exhaustion at the end of a day spent sprinting around with bolt cutters in hand. “So many opera rehearsals are just spent standing in one spot and then moving elegantly to a second spot and standing there. It makes you neurotic about your voice. Here you are really working in a much more rounded way. You are not just a voice with legs” (Freeman 1987).

This ability to draw out skills of acting and characterisation from singers has led to some outstanding recent examples of acting and characterisation. We might think, for example, of Catherine Naglestad’s revelatory Minnie in La fanciulla del West; of Günter Pappendell, whose Marcello rebalanced the well-worn story of La Bohème into a study of friendship as well as of love; of Dagmar Manzel’s hilarious rendition of an Egyptian queen apparently reborn as a Berlin cleaning lady in Die Perlen der Cleopatra; of Christopher Purves and Iestyn Davies each presenting their own combinations of strength and vulnerability as Saul and David. We might also point to an idiosyncratic conceptualisation of fidelity in Kosky’s approach to staging works of the past. In Chap. 8, Michael Halliwell quotes David Levin’s identification of two approaches to staging an opera, in terms of strong and weak “readings”. A strong reading “accounts for the most meaning of a given text”;

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it is “surprising, illuminating previously invisible points in the text and thus asserting some distance from prevailing and predictable accounts” (Levin 1997, p. 51). A “weak” reading on the other hand “tends to embrace a prevailing understanding of the work’s meaning, often seeking to reproduce the work’s prevailing aesthetic identity, often presenting itself as a non-reading, one that does not consciously venture an interpretation but instead merely seeks to present the work in its most familiar form” (Levin 1997, p. 52). Levin’s work is useful in identifying two forms of “fidelity” in staging. While it is tempting to place Kosky’s work in terms of strong readings, the focus on interpretation and meaning in Levin’s categories has the effect that they do not always quite fit Kosky’s work. We would argue that Kosky’s fidelity in some of his productions relates to performance texture as much as to meaning and interpretation in the usual sense. For example, Richard Strauss’s Die schweigsame Frau is an opera with a texture characterised by moments of semiotic density: the score cites themes from a range of operas, fitting its setting among the members of an opera troupe. As many of today’s operagoers are unlikely to recognise Strauss’s citations to their full extent, Kosky replicates this thickening of semiotic density at the level of costume and props, offering audience members a chance to recognise appearances by Lohengrin’s swan, Madama Butterfly, a Valkyrie, Violetta, Rigoletto, Escamillo etc. among crowds of others. In his revivals of jazz operettas, works that were originally showcases for performers with their specific star “turn”, fidelity to the overall performance texture by reworking the operetta to suit the “turn” of the star at hand means a blatant infidelity to the text: thus Daisy Darlington, originally a world-champion tap dancer when played in Ball im Savoy in 1932 by Rosy Barsony, becomes a world-champion acrobatic big-band yodeller when played in 2012 by Katharine Mehrling. A striking example of fidelity to performance texture was displayed in Kosky’s Carmen, which staged each number in a different dance style, from Bob Fosse to soft-shoe shuffle, engaging with the texture of Bizet’s multi-style score and revealing its joltingly disjunctive nature to audiences overfamiliar with its component parts and used to productions that work to smooth over, rather than revel in, the score’s “crackle of difference”, as Scott McMillan (2006, p. 2) might put it. In the process, Kosky’s fidelity to Carmen’s performance texture suggests an unexpected affinity between Bizet’s work and the similarly disjunctive scores of Kosky’s jazz operettas. In fact, it is difficult to pinpoint what defines a Kosky production. His output is varied and substantial. Born in 1967, he has been directing since at least his late teens: appendix 1’s selected list of his productions runs to 110 entries. He has established a name for himself across a wider range of genres than almost any other director—in spoken theatre, ranging from Ancient Greek tragedy, through Shakespeare to devised theatre; in opera, from French baroque, through eighteenthcentury classicism and nineteenth-century Romantics from the Italian, German and Russian traditions, to Puccini’s verismo operas, twentieth-century atonal work, and new compositions; in musicals from Broadway’s Golden Age; and in operetta, from well-known Offenbach pieces to revivals of forgotten 1930s jazz operettas. Although Kosky has worked regularly with some designers, for example, the late Peter Corrigan in his early years in Melbourne, and more recently Katrin Lea Tag in

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Germany, unlike many directors, Kosky does not have a single designer with whom he routinely works. His productions therefore do not have the consistent design appearance that can lead to directors being identified with what is in fact the work of their design colleagues. A further difficulty is a geographical one: born in Australia, and, since 2018 a dual Australian-German citizen, his twentieth-century Australian work is largely unknown in Europe, while Australia has had only a limited opportunity to experience his twenty-first-century work developed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. In this volume we aim to reflect the diversity of possible approaches both to and in his work. The divergent treatments that Kosky has accorded different works has been disconcerting for some. Ryan Minor (2015, p. 208), for example, is uncomfortable with the contrast in approach between Kosky’s productions of the opera Iphigenie auf Tauris and the jazz operetta Ball im Savoy, both for the Komische Oper Berlin, claiming that in comparison to the former, the latter “is in almost every regard a thoroughly conventional production: period sets and costumes, a relatively naturalist approach to acting and declamation, and no obvious conceptual framework making broader claims about the work’s meaning or reception history”. As a result, Minor “find[s] it very difficult to square with the assertion that operetta isn’t opera’s poor country cousin, is equally legitimate in its own right, and needs to be taken just as seriously as opera” (2015, p. 210). But to take a work seriously can mean to do justice to its will to entertain. For Kosky, as we discuss below, to take jazz operetta just as seriously as opera is to acknowledge that its particular demands and priorities are also legitimate: it would be an act of disrespect, facetious in its very earnestness, if one were to stage to jazz operetta as one would an opera. If the chapters that follow identify recurring directorial approaches and staging techniques, this is not an attempt to homogenize Kosky’s works. These approaches and techniques are not classifiers that, once revealed, allow his output to be seen as a coherent, easily graspable œuvre. They are flexible tools Kosky employs in engaging with the needs of an individual work, rather than skeleton keys that allow audiences to decode any given staging by him. Where Kosky uses the same technique in different works, it is likely to be used for different ends, to create different effects and meanings. To approach a Kosky staging is to be willing to recognise familiar devices while being ready to rethink their use in relation to the piece at hand.

It Begins with the Theatre As an Australian working in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the twenty-first century, and as an Australian who incorporated European techniques to Australian theatre in productions largely of works of the European past, Kosky might be

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classified in terms of the transnational in both phases of his career.1 However, in his work he does more than bring together aspects of different national cultures on stage: as we argue below, he repeatedly uses theatre to draw attention to the transnational within the national, at the level of society as much as at the level of theatre and opera. As such, he sets himself within a strand of theatre history—a dominant strand of German theatre history, and an often-overlooked strand of Australian theatre history—in which theatre acts as a shaper of the meaning of the national. The two terms “transnational” and “international” have in recent decades often been played off against each other in academic discourse, even though they have both been in circulation for far longer as virtual synonyms. The distinction cannot be traced back to the differences between the prefixes “trans-” and “inter-”, since in common usage “international” has not been restricted to the dealings and arrangements between nations as organised polities: the phrase “international tour”, for example, credibly implies that the tour proceeds across (trans) national borders rather than occurs in some fancifully empty space between (inter) nations. At issue in the academic distinction between the two terms is just how these boundaries and thresholds are negotiated. Wanting to hone the term “transnational” for use in their studies of how migrants resist or defer assimilation, the sociologists Alejandro Portes, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt comment: As a strategic research site, the merit of transnational studies has been to call attention to the multiple activities of common people across national borders, seeking to adapt and, if possible, overcome the constraints imposed upon them by an expanding capitalist economy. It is, as we called it in past publications, a form of “globalization from below” set in partial opposition to the “globalization from above” implemented by major economic and political actors (2017, p. 1489).

Here the transnational sets itself apart from, even at odds with the modus operandi of multinational corporations and intergovernmental bodies. The transnational lacks the sovereign detachment of a company coolly managing the risks posed to its business by the various jurisdictions it straddles. It does not instrumentalise national differences. But nor does it take it upon itself to be the political guardian of these differences, as in the bureaucracy of the UN with its professed care for the territorial integrity of its member states. The transnational neither rises above borders nor defends them: it lives them.2 In what way can a theatre, as a state-subsidised institution as it is frequently in Germany and also, if to a lesser degree, in Australia, count as transnational in this sense? The identity of the nation has to be put into question. This does not require wordy monologues to be delivered downstage on the problem of belonging. It can be a matter of casting, acting styles, choice of text, instrumentation and so forth. In this 1

Chapter 2 discusses some of the European influences Kosky introduced to Melbourne theatre in the 1990s. See also Ulrike Garde’s work on German-Australian intercultural exchange (especially Garde 2007, 2009) for discussions of Kosky’s engagement with German theatre in Australia. 2 Homi Bhabha has proposed that the “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees [. . .] may be the terrains of world literature”, reducible to neither “the ‘sovereignty’ of national cultures, nor the universalism of human culture” (1994, p. 17).

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latter respect, Kosky’s decision to open his first season as Intendant at the Komische Oper Berlin with The Monteverdi Trilogy was a powerful signal of the direction in which Kosky was to take the opera house, and a demonstration of the pleasures that a configuring of Berlin and opera as transnational could hold. For this trilogy of works by Monteverdi, whose L’Orfeo (1607) is the oldest opera still in the performance repertoire, Kosky commissioned new versions of the scores from the Uzbeki-Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin that incorporated instruments from the standard Western classical orchestra alongside a wide range of instruments not usually heard in the opera pit or the classical concert hall. These included an accordion, a bandoneon (a type of concertina popular in Argentina), a cimbalom (a type of zither used in Eastern European, Greek and Roma music), a djoza (a bowed, four-stringed Iraqi instrument), an oud (a type of Syrian lute), a kora (a West African bridge-harp), electric guitars, a ukulele and a Hawaiian guitar. While the orchestra for the first and third instalments of the trilogy played in the pit, it was situated around the edges of the stage in Odysseus, the central instalment: the oud and kora, played respectively by Syrian-born Marwan Alkarjousli and Malian-born Djelifily Sako, were very visible in profile stage left. Migrant instrumentalists here contributed visibly and audibly to the telling of a migration-themed plot. The constantly changing groupings of instruments in Kats-Chernin’s score kept the ear alive to variations in aural texture: the overall result was not one of musical exoticism or an attempt to turn Monteverdi into a coherent form of “world music”, but instead an awareness of Berlin’s transnational character and the pleasures that could emerge from a radical inclusivity of performers, instruments and musical styles.3 The incorporation of languages and accents other than the dominant “national” stage language of the production is another way Kosky has reconfigured both the state and the theatre as inherently transnational. In his 1997 production of Molière’s Tartuffe for the Sydney Theatre Company, for example, many of the cast were migrants: Melita Jurisic (Elmire) from Croatia; Rostislav Orel (Valère) from Russia; Jacek Koman (Tartuffe) from Poland; Christian Manon (Monsieur Loyal) from France. While Jurisic arrived in Australia aged five and her English does not have a noticeable Croatian accent, the others migrated to Australia as adults and speak English with more or less noticeable Russian, Polish and French accents. Most of the production was set during a summertime Christmas. Nonetheless, if an effect of this

3 For extended discussion of Kosky’s and Kats-Chernin’s work on the Monteverdi Trilogy, see Severn (2021b). Other operas with unusual instrumentation commissioned by the Komische Oper Berlin during Kosky’s time as Intendant but not directed by him personally include the children’s operas Ali Baba und die 40 Räuber [Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves] (2012) with music by Taner Akyol, and Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten [The Musicians of Bremen] (2017) with music by Attila Kadri Şendil. These operas have bilingual librettos in German and Turkish, and their orchestras include Turkish instruments: for Ali Baba, the asma davul (a drum), kaval (an end-blown flute), zurna (a woodwind reed instrument) and bağlama (a long-necked lute), for The Musicians of Bremen the zurna, bağlama, oud and kanun (a form of zither) (Komische Oper Berlin 2018, pp. 49–52, 73–75). For further discussion of Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten, see Stone 2021.

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setting and the range of accents within an extended family was to replicate Sydney’s aural landscape and reflect the transnational character of many modern Australian families in ways not frequently encountered in mainstage theatre in Australia at the time, the French play was not permitted to naturalise itself as Australian. Nor did the production attempt to naturalise European works as unproblematically part of the Australian theatrical landscape. Not only did the production retain the characters’ French names, but the king’s messenger who appears at the end was a flamboyantly bewigged intrusion by seventeenth-century France into twentieth-century Australia. Kosky has also incorporated a manipulation of language and accent at the Komische Oper Berlin in order to prompt audiences to interrogate the difference between belonging and non-belonging. In Kosky’s production of Ball im Savoy, for example, a duet for Bébé the maid and Archibald the butler is in Yiddish rather than German, while Agnes Zwierko, playing Tangolita, an Argentinian dancer, sings in her native Polish. In Candide, Pangloss speaks German with a Yiddish accent, while Maria Fiselier as Paquette and Nicole Chevalier as Cunegonde speak some lines in their native Dutch and English. Here, in a work with migration and exile as themes, Kosky both throws the nation into question and draws attention to the transnational nature of opera as a business and art form. Kosky’s 1998 King Lear incorporated several of these techniques. For example, it cast Indigenous actor Deborah Mailman as Cordelia, in a play in which that character is excluded in the division of the kingdom. Simply by doing so, the production invited a reading that related it to ongoing struggles for Aboriginal Land Rights in Australia. By casting Mailman as the daughter of the white John Bell as Lear, and as the sister of the white Melita Jurisic and Di Adams (Goneril and Regan), the production also invited a reading that related it to the Stolen Generations, victims of the practice in Australia throughout much of the twentieth century of removing Indigenous children from their families and, depending on skin colour, placing them with white families or into institutional settings. However, the production also cast migrants to Australia from non-Anglophone backgrounds: Kazuhiro Muroyama (Oswald), a Japanese migrant to Australia joined Melita Jurisic, Rostislav Orel (Kent), and Christian Manon (various roles) from the previous year’s Tartuffe. Muroyama, Orel and Manon delivered most of their lines in accented English, but also some in their native Japanese, Russian and French. That the production was directed by a Jewish director with an East European migrant heritage and featured a range of European and American influences in terms of acting, design and music— including Brechtian Arrangement and mirroring scenes, stylisation and elements of the Meyerholdian grotesque, a production number of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in the style of a Jerry Herman diva showstopper from the Golden Age Broadway musical, a duet riffing on Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb, and snatches of songs from Carmen, Abba, Al Jolson, Eddie Fisher, Queen, and Boney M together with a demented version of Beethoven, topped off with Irish stepdance à la Riverdance—added further to the complexity of its intervention into national imagery, vocal soundscapes, layers of British colonial settlement and later non-British European and Asian migrant arrivals to Indigenous land. By asserting the right of those from a non-British heritage to make Shakespeare their own, the

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production—to the discomfort of some critics and audiences—also asserted the right of theatre to put into question the identity of the nation. That Kosky did so in King Lear can be seen as another example of Kosky’s radical fidelity to his sources: the play concerns itself with changing national identities in an archipelagic context at a time when England was facing a reshaping of its position within the British Isles following the accession of the Scottish King James VI to the English and Irish thrones on the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth of England and Ireland, although this aspect is largely ignored in modern productions. As a worksite of cultural production, the theatre is almost inevitably in friction with the idea that the culture of the nation has already achieved its definitive shape; it is almost a given that the theatre will be a scene of experimentation and contestation with regard to how a society conceives itself. A cultic re-enactment of established tropes, while of course it is not unheard of, is a misuse of the theatre’s cultural machinery. Yet a state, for its own reactionary purposes, might prefer to fund theatres in which cultural production is so channelled that national identity curls in upon itself ever more tightly: such a state appeals to this image of the nation as the popular basis of its legitimacy and thereby absolves itself of any accountability to the flesh-and-blood individuals under its authority. But there are also governments that, wary of the modern amalgam of the nation and the state, see value in supporting diversity in cultural production. Funding decisions on grant applications are made at arm’s length from the ruling party, and freedom of expression is protected under law. What a government can expect from the inventiveness of a galvanised cultural ecology is a positive feedback loop that extends out to encompass the creative industries more broadly (Throsby 2010). The economic benefits therefrom do not even have to be weighed against the political cost of losing the legitimating image of the sovereign people, since the autonomy of judgement that such states cultivate in their populations increases the meaningfulness—and hence legitimating power—of citizens’ consent to a representative liberal democratic government. The transnationalism of cultural production is not a threat to such states, and it is in their interest to combat even the appearance of having co-opted the autonomy of the artists they assist financially. In Germany and Australia, the two countries where Kosky has been most active, the question of the nation in cultural production has different ongoing tensions on account of the respective standing of the concept of the nation state. Federal government policy on the arts in Australia can alternate between a promotion of nation-building and a defence of freedom of expression that is alien to contemporary Germany, at least in the nonchalance in relation to the switch in discourse. In Germany, by comparison and for obvious historical reasons, the advocates of freedom of expression are more on their guard against assertive nationalism, with which artistic freedom is commonly deemed incompatible. German nationalists of the present day, who often publicly chafe under associations with Hitler’s dictatorship, are quick to deny that the latter regime constituted the essence and consummation of German nationalism, but they still baulk at the inclusiveness that would amount to a radical break with the Nazi past. The political myth of Australia as a new nation, as a work in progress, tends to obviate the conflict that can arise between

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freedom of expression and an entrenched national imaginary. Multiculturalism, as a bipartisan government position in Australia for nearly half a century, is interpreted in policy as contributing to the genesis of the nation, with the forms of life of migrant communities not so much finding their place within an existing Australian culture as helping to construct what that culture might be at all. It is not the case that the adoption of multiculturalism was accompanied by an abandonment of the very concept of the nation state and a rethinking of the foundation of post-monarchical political sovereignty. If artistic freedom therefore does not run up against obstacles in the concrete shape of the nation in Australia, it is only because Australia is a nation state whose time has not yet arrived. This is not to suggest that artistic freedom is less secure in Australia than in states whose governing parties vigilantly eschew nationalism, but it is to indicate the processes of cultural formation with which it is bound up. In Germany, by contrast, the nation state is a spectre, never fully exorcised, but against which civic republicanism, social democracy and the continental structures of the EU have been deployed to counterbalance and to contain. The history of German theatre is a history of running ahead of the nation state and also of running away from it. Kosky’s interventions as Intendant at the Komische Oper (discussed below), which from one vantage point cut against the grain, from another build on a cosmopolitanism of long standing. The expressly national theatres that in the late eighteenth century first broke in a wave across the German-speaking world cannot, for example, be trimmed down to nothing more than an incident in the prehistory of the founding of the German Empire of the Hohenzollern in 1871. The “national” in the name of these theatres in city-states such as Hamburg or small principalities such as Mannheim was a declaration of accessibility, as Marvin Carlson notes: The term “National Theatre” came to be applied regularly to ventures on the Hamburg model, which may seem odd, as Germany would not become a nation for another century, but the label distinguished such theatres from court theatres and touring companies. In the eighteenth century the term “National Theatre” implied a general public, with an audience primarily composed of members of the bourgeoisie, in a theatre that was subsidised, non-commercial, and permanently established (2008, p. 94).

The “national” in the names of these theatres was a way of flagging, first and foremost, inclusiveness (ticket prices, however, were a means of enforcing exclusiveness). The Bürger whose custom these theatres sought were not—and could not be—the citizens of a territorially circumscribed nation state: they were the nationals of a nation without political borders and caste barriers. And as the repertoire of these newly minted national theatres consisted predominantly of works by non-German authors, it cannot be said either that the national was considered to be culturally exclusive. But already in the national theatres of the late eighteenth century there stirs the ambiguous beginnings of that usage of the term “national” which the German state was later to mobilise. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his writings on the theatre in Hamburg, asks himself repeatedly what a specifically German theatre would be like. Contradistinguishing the national from the foreign rather than from the courtly, he rails against the prevailing tyranny of French classical models. But the great “No” of

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Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–1769) and other texts on theatre is merely Lessing’s opening gambit, and a reactive and otherwise empty nationalism is far from being the sum of what he means by the national. Lessing’s inquiry, which has no counterpart of comparable prominence in the London of Shakespeare’s day or the Paris of Racine’s, has a set of hard-nosed practical motivations. If the fitful commercial viability of German theatre can be attributed to the programming of mediocre translations of works that run counter to the national character, then popularity in the form of ticket sales may well follow from popularity in the form of sentiments and plots more in keeping with the tastes and principles of local audiences. Yet Lessing did not want to minister to a public that had already revealed its preferences: the new national theatre was to answer to a community that it itself would help bring into being. This nation of and for the theatre is accordingly identical with neither the nation whose distribution the state can make the basis of territorial claims nor the nation by means of which sovereignty can survive the deposing of the monarch. And inasmuch as the English theatrical tradition was to be an ally in Lessing’s project rather than an impediment, the national in his national theatre is from the outset intrinsically transnational. According to Michael J. Sosulski, there was good reason for Lessing to believe the national was up for definition: In the fragmented world that was Germany in the eighteenth century, few Germans could have claimed to have a sufficient overview of the geographic and cultural diversity of its territories to judge what was truly provincial and what was really national. One of the problems in establishing a national theater in a land such as eighteenth-century Germany was the fact that the country had no capital city. Britain had its London, and France its Paris, both true capitals in which ruling monarchs resided, adding their formidable influence on taste in fashion and the arts. Given this fact, there is a sense in which it would not be wrong to conclude that all customs in Germany were local, and that a true national culture simply did not exist. This in fact may well be the reason that proponents of the German national theater consistently looked beyond customs and temperament and sought the nation in a higher sphere, one which could transcend the numerous and local material cultures to connect the diverse populations of the lands, principalities, and free cities in a unified community of morals (2007, pp. 47–48).

Unable to exercise political sovereignty over the individual human beings who compose it and who live as the subjects of autocrats or as the citizens of a handful of free cities, the nation exercises moral sovereignty in the guise of a civilising mission.4 It polices and disparages the parochial, and in setting itself against the 4 The theatre, for Friedrich Schiller, is a national institution in this sense. In the address he delivered in Mannheim in 1784 Schiller revises Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers to call the theatre an equiprimordial institution of the state. And while a national theatre in the late eighteenth century faced as yet neither a national executive, a national legislature nor a national judiciary whose excesses it could be relied upon to check, Schiller urges that it be treated as a court in which the powerful lose the immunity they otherwise enjoy (1822, p. 42). Schiller’s theatre thus fills the gap opened up by the dysfunction of the Reichskammergericht of the Holy Roman Empire where appeals against regional judgements routinely struggled to receive a hearing. Unrecognised in the political structure of the Empire, the theatre grounds its claim to higher authority by siding with the nation that derives its shape and substance from justice (it is not a given, but rather a norm).

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perceived small-mindedness of the latter, Lessing’s nation employs the resources of the transnational. This is a horizontal transcendence, unlike the vertical transcendence of Sosulski’s “higher sphere”—not upwards, but abroad. In little over a century the nationalist calling of German theatre would take far more concrete measures to overcome the local than any of those undertaken by the dozen or so self-titled national theatres of the late 1700s. The push for a standardised High German pronunciation, which was understandably more a concern among touring companies than the house-bound national theatres, had had its supporters from early on, but it was not until 1898 that a conference of linguists and theatre directors was held in the Apollosaal of the Berlin State Opera with an eye to codifying Bühnendeutsch (stage German). Under the cover of a theatrical reform, Northern German modes of pronunciation were erected as a general standard, and the region’s political and economic dominance was carried over into matters of diction. The local, which throughout Germany had previously been spared the metropolitan hegemony that London and Paris had long exerted over Britain and France respectively, thereby collided with something that was itself neither sublime nor exotic. Needless to say, the rulings of the conference were not unwelcome to the Wilhelmine state in its efforts to integrate its various populations.5 In recent years the politicians of the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) have sought to frame the public debate concerning state funding for theatre in terms of theatre’s relationship to the nation. In the manifesto approved at its 2016 federal party congress in Stuttgart, the AfD proclaimed itself in favour of declaring that government has a statutory duty toward culture, but by pairing its commitment to backing culture with a repudiation of multiculturalism, the party shows itself up as shackled to an unwieldy and untenable essentialism in its idea of the national culture. The German culture that its self-appointed defenders invoke is not only a museum piece denied the encounters that might revitalise it, but it is also a caricature of the German culture of the past with its long history of interactions with other artistic traditions and practices.6 And even though the AfD’s understanding of German culture does not replicate the narrowness of the proto-Germanic fantasts among the Nazis, all three of the so-called sources of the AfD’s version of German culture—namely, Christianity, the West’s scientific and humanistic heritage, and Roman law (AfD 2016, p. 46)—are enabling conditions of the governmental doctrine of multiculturalism that the party habitually and vociferously excoriates. The putative value-neutrality of multiculturalism (the basis of its arguments for a relaxation of government demands for migrant groups to assimilate) was prepared for by the Christian privileging of individual faith over external compliance and the carving out of separate spheres for the secular and 5

Theodor Siebs, who compiled the volume Deutsche Bühnenaussprache following the conference, boosts what he sees as the extra-theatrical benefits (1898, pp. 8–12). 6 A German linguistic purist who, for example, resolved to avoid words of foreign provenance would lapse into silence. A notoriously fatuous attempt in this direction, Percy Grainger’s “blueeyed English” had by necessity to be half-hearted in applying its criteria for exclusion, since it would otherwise fail to come up with any list of acceptable words.

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the clerical; by humanism’s critiques of state paternalism; and by the normative and administrative stability of the multiethnic Roman Empire’s legal framework with which Europe acquired a tradition of accommodation and a set of principles for mediating new or resurgent conflicts. According to its manifesto, the AfD views multiculturalism as an existential threat to the survival of the nation state as a cultural unit. As a liberal doctrine, multiculturalism is obviously not invested in the survival of the nation state. What is less obvious here—and which betrays a sleight of hand or obtuseness on the part of the AfD—is the convertibility between culture and the rhetorical flourishes and folkish paraphernalia with which a state decks itself out in order to pass for a monocultural nation state. In the parliament of the state of Berlin the AfD sits in opposition and while its members bristle at decisions to fund particular arts companies, they are not able to set government arts policy, at either the state (Land) or federal (Bund) level. If the AfD itself does not merit being regarded as the backdrop against which Kosky currently works, the party nonetheless encapsulates and performs several common talking points about culture that Kosky’s directorial and managerial practice conspicuously flouts. His transnationalism is not merely a matter of his biography, as the grandson of Jewish migrants to Australia and as an expatriate Australian active in Europe. The transnationalism extends to his willingness to run with influences, to find a way to respond to the forms of life that happen, geographically or psychically, to be at hand. While there is a cosmopolitanism in this, it should not be confused with the universal intelligibility of a hegemonic global culture. The transnational, which disrupts the speciously self-sufficient image that a nation is told to have of itself, likewise does not cross borders to arrive at the “world” as such. In Kosky’s productions it injects into the proceedings a disorientation to which audiences may or may not be equal. In his Zurich staging of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, which premiered in 2014, Kosky referenced, for example, the demented homosocial camaraderie of Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971). It is fair to ask how many in the auditorium would have been familiar with this film, notwithstanding its iconic status in Australian cinema. The allusion was not an in-joke that Kosky had at the expense of Central European theatregoers. To twig to such allusions is, in its own way, not to get them. A case in point is the reprise of Marlene Dietrich’s gorilla suit from Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (Fig. 1.5) in Kosky’s production of Carmen for the Frankfurt Opera and the Royal Opera House London, discussed above. (Fig. 1.6) Judging by reviews and online comments, the visual jolt of seeing the title role in this unexpected costume lasted longer for those audience members who did not recognise this visual quotation and therefore could not set about translating the gorilla suit into an expression of transnational solidarity among fictional femmes fatales. Instead of a problem that is to be solved, the semiotic thickening that results from Kosky’s transcultural innuendoes and citations is itself the pay-off. The message is less important than the space in which meaning is made, in which language asserts itself without being construed. This is the foreignness intrinsic to every work of art inasmuch as its expressiveness is irreducible to a communicable proposition. It is a foreignness that is not reserved for what is foreign in the conventional sense. A director’s strictly private inspirations can introduce

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Fig. 1.5 Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (dir. Josef von Sternberg, Paramount Pictures, 1932)

Fig. 1.6 Paula Murrihy in Carmen (dir. Barrie Kosky, Oper Frankfurt, 2016). Photo credit: Oper Frankfurt/Monika Rittershaus

something enigmatic into a production and can also be received by an audience as bearing the incalculable weight of withheld meanings of a language that they do not yet know (these personal “touches” can also fall flat if a spectator concludes that they do not open out to an entire form of life so much as attest to the director’s selfindulgence). The foreign, for its part, can be met with resistance and categorised as mere sound without significance, as the exotic colouring in which the audience does not see itself implicated. The different tones and valences of the foreign correspond to the strains and ambiguities of the national. A national theatre always either comes too late or too

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early for its own birth. When it arrives in advance of itself, the national aspect of its repertoire, acting styles, set design and so forth are still to be established because it falls to it to first establish them: in its inchoate condition the foreign and the native cannot be reliably told apart. But when a national theatre decides it can only follow in the wake of the nation that has already been born, it concedes that its stage pictures are representations, that its true life is elsewhere. In Australian newspaper reviews of Kosky’s productions in the 1990s and 2000s their outlandish qualities were often emphasised, as though to differentiate these works from a national theatrical tradition with which readers were supposedly conversant. Yet Kosky’s use on stage of languages other than English and his militant eclecticism with regard to texts, performance modes, and wardrobe cannot be set at odds with Australian theatre history without a sizeable dose of selective amnesia. The archival evidence does not support the idea of an enduringly insular, Anglophone theatrical culture, nor of a colonial theatrical culture exclusively fixated on Anglophone British works. At issue is not simply the steady influx of visiting performers who from the mid nineteenth century onwards, as news of the gold rushes circled the planet, deemed it worth their while to tour the country and to cater to its audiences’ taste for Chinese opera, Japanese acrobatics, Italian melodrama and Russian ballet.7 Every theatre, insofar as it understands its appeal to lie in being an exception to the everyday world that surrounds it, has an eye out for the unconventional, the extravagant, and the startling: the temptation of the foreign is its native element. It is accordingly at once noteworthy and unsurprising that the first professional production to take place in Hobart was not of a play written in Australia or even the British Isles, but rather of August von Kotzebue’s The Stranger (Menschenhass und Reue).8 The habit of conceptualising Australian theatre as primarily theatre that uses Australian voices to tell Australian stories, rather than the theatre that is performed in Australia, has resulted in early works that provide an alternative to national conditions being largely ignored or sidelined in Australian theatre history. Barrie Kosky’s revivals of so-called “jazz operettas” at the Komische Oper have been justly celebrated as a practical way of providing a corrective to German theatre history. These works, created by composers, librettists and performers with a range of national origins, many of whom were Jewish, were lost to the stage after the Nazi

7 For example, fourteen Chinese opera companies were in operation in Victoria between 1850 and 1870 (Zhengting 2012, p. 4). For further details on Chinese opera companies in the nineteenthcentury Australian colonies and after Federation, see Rocke (2021) and Williams (2021). For Japanese acrobatic troupes in late nineteenth-century Australasia, see Sissons (1999). As the world’s wealthiest city, Gold-Rush-era Melbourne attracted Europe’s biggest stars, among them the Italian actress Adelaide Ristori and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, both of whom performed in their native languages to appreciative audiences. For an account of Ristori’s Australian tour, see Mitchell 1995a, 1995b. For Bernhardt’s Australian tour, see Fraser (1998). 8 See the review in the weekly Tasmanian (27 December 1833) included in Love 1984, pp. 24–25. Kotzebue’s drama received its premiere in Tallinn, Estonia in 1788 and was to remain a staple of the German-language stage for the next half century.

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rise to power. These works are characterised by successful international and interracial love stories, are frequently multilingual, sexually liberated, and, while musically oriented towards Black America, incorporate an eclectic mixture of dance rhythms and styles from a range of national cultures. Kosky’s collaborative efforts at their reconstruction, revival and a reincorporation into German theatre history as German works have spearheaded an explosion of jazz operetta performance in Germany and elsewhere in the second decade of the twenty-first century.9 However, jazz operettas were also performed in the 1930s beyond Germany. As recent studies (Becker 2014; Platt et al. 2014; Frey 2019; Scott 2019) have shown, many of them transferred with greater or lesser success to New York’s Broadway and London’s West End in English-language versions. But Berlin jazz operettas revived by the Komische Oper such as Ball im Savoy, Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, and Viktoria und ihr Husar were also successfully staged in Australia in the 1930s, and European stars were imported to perform in them alongside Australians. To lose sight of this is to lose sight of a part of Australian theatre history that provided an alternative to the racist White Australia policies of post-Federation Australia and an Australia characterised by a sudden drop in immigration after assisted migration was brought to a close in 1929. At Sydney’s Tivoli Theatre in 1934, for example, the French star actress Alice Delysia reprised the leading role in Mother of Pearl, the English-language version of Oscar Straus’ 1932 Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, that she had played in London (Everyones 1934). Also in 1934, the Jewish Hungarian comic actor Oskar Denes reprised his Berlin role in Ábrahám’s Ball im Savoy in Sydney (as Ball at the Savoy), where he was discussed as a star able to command “a man-sized contract to justify advance glorification as one of the most distinguished artists to visit Australia” (Everyones 1935). The following year he reprised his role in Viktoria und ihr Husar (as Viktoria and her Hussar) in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane (Sydney Morning Herald 1935; Courier-Mail 1935). Brisbane’s Courier-Mail quotes Denes as follows: “I regard this engagement in Australia as the culmination of my desires”, he said. “When I started off my life as an actor I could speak only Hungarian. Now I play in three languages— English, German, and my own. When Sir Alfred Butt offered me a part in London I was so frightened that I wanted to refuse, because I could not speak or understand a word of the British language. I arrived in London to play in Viktoria and her Hussar, and I had to learn my part off, parrot fashion. I did not know whether I said it correctly or not, but the audience laughed, and next morning I woke to find myself famous. The same thing happened when I first went to Germany and played in Leipzig and Berlin. I learned my part, and my fellow actors taught me until they informed me I was pronouncing my words correctly, and then I had the same success there. However, I have always been fortunate” (Courier-Mail 1935).

Here the Brisbane press emphasises the transnational nature of jazz operetta in terms of personnel and frames operetta audiences as open to the foreign. With its

9

For discussion of the revival of jazz operetta and the challenges this poses, see Severn (2021a).

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storyline of international and successful interracial, intercultural romances (including that of the Hungarian Count Ferry and O Lia San, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a French father, another successful interracial, intercultural romance), Viktoria und ihr Husar provided an alternative to Australia’s racist legislative framework, while not ignoring the impact of racist laws and the impact of borders and states on individuals: Ferry and O Lia San’s Japanese marriage is not recognised in Hungary, and the operetta opens in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. Kosky’s transnational theatre can find its roots in Australian as well as German theatre— providing we are prepared to recognise such works as Australian theatre. In recent decades the local content requirements enforced in the arts by successive Australian governments are a response to the allegedly unfair commercial advantage that foreign outputs often enjoy, not only by virtue of their economy of scale, but also as a result of the local preference for imported goods. In one respect, there is a cynical circumvention of the content requirements when an adaptation of a foreign play is passed off as a new, locally produced work. For example, to meet the local content requirements, Andrew Upton’s adaptations for the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) neither substituted Australian place names for the place names mentioned in Ibsen’s and Genet’s original texts nor introduced endemic colloquialisms. In a Q&A on the 2013 production of Genet’s The Maids that the STC posted on-line, Upton’s modesty risks giving the game away. When the interviewer asked him how he achieved having his own voice in his adaptations, he replied: “Just lucky I guess”. In another respect, however, the brazen flouting of the spirit of these requirements aids and abets the transnationalism in the country’s theatrical culture. The vagueness and “shonkiness” of the concept of the national does not mean, as it should, that every practitioner is granted such leeway: there is a despotic arbitrariness to the ire that self-appointed guardians of the national have vented on Kosky’s Australian productions.

It Begins with the Theatre Kosky’s Jewishness, particularly his practice of staging Jewish-themed works from a Jewish perspective, was seen by some Australian reviewers in the 1990s as creating barriers to accessibility for non-Jewish audiences. For example, discussing Kosky’s 1990 staging of Handel’s oratorio Belshazzar with Treason of Images, Clive O’Connell (1990), the music reviewer for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, praised the musical performances, but found that theatrically, “this Belshazzar is something of a hotch-potch. Doubtless the more one is informed about Jewish culture and practices the more the oddities acquire meaning”. Similarly, John Carmody (1993), reviewing Kosky’s production of Larry Sitsky’s The Golem for the Australian Opera, an opera based on a medieval Jewish legend, wrote that “it runs the risk, indeed, with its panoply of Jewish reference, of excluding the ‘outsider’ and of obscuring [the opera’s] narrative structure”. Leonard Radic (1994), discussing Kosky’s Gilgul production of The Wilderness Room, a devised piece about

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eighteenth-century British Jewish convicts transported to Australia discussed in Chap. 2, found the production only “intermittently engaging. That, however, is the judgement of someone with a non-Jewish background. Like all of Kosky’s work, The Wilderness Room draws heavily on Jewish tradition and practices. It is rich in symbolism and historical references, but they are not necessarily symbols or references that non-Jews will appreciate. [. . .] There are songs in Hebrew or Yiddish, but no [spoken] words”.10 In fact, programme notes were provided for Belshazzar and director’s notes for The Golem to help guide those unfamiliar with the aspects of Jewish culture invoked in the performance. These were of a length and register that would have allowed audience members to read and digest them in the auditorium before the production began. Nonetheless, Alison Croggon did not consult the programme for Belshazzar, but was still able to appreciate the performance. Noting that “what I experienced was thus mostly uninformed by narrative, although it was possible to follow the major action of the libretto”, she found that in some aspects “(as in the use of a typewriter to punctuate the music or the old telephones as the sacred Jewish vessels) it is impudently witty; and at the best moments of all—those linked, for instance, with Jewish ritual—it is breathtakingly beautiful theatre” (Croggon 1990). In line with Gilgul’s practice, more extensive programme notes were provided for The Wilderness Room, including biographies of the convicts portrayed, a five-page “Passover History”, including details of Jewish Passover ritual, excerpts from the Biblical passages that formed some of the production’s spoken text, a genealogical table from Adam to Moses, a seven-page glossary of Jewish terms, and translations of the song lyrics. While this peritheatrical material provided framing information, it was unlikely that anyone would be able to read and digest it in advance of the production. Nonetheless, Steven Carroll (1994) noted of The Wilderness Room that Trying to locate a connection between two cultures is a difficult matter, for some audience members will be familiar with the myths being treated, while others will have to rely on the program. The company has previously stated that it is not doing theatre-in-education, but it is, by its very nature, in something of a bind. It has to find a balance between explaining too much and too little. A theatrical zone halfway between the two has to be created. While [Gilgul’s previous trilogy of Jewish-themed plays] achieved a fine balance, its latest production, The Wilderness Room, pushes its audience to the limit in quest of this territory—highly appropriate for a Jewish theatre company.

10 For details of the creation of The Wilderness Room, see Richards and Prior 2002. Radic’s reference to all Kosky’s work drawing on Jewish tradition and practices is not borne out by fact. As well as early productions such as Macbeth, Orfeo and La Calisto, a survey of high-profile works directed by Kosky prior to Radic’s 1994 review—such as The Knot Garden for the Spoleto Festival (1989), The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville for Victorian State Opera (1991), Oedipus Rex for Opera Queensland (1993), Faust, Parts 1 and 2 for Melbourne Theatre Company (1993), The Oresteia for Victorian State Opera (1993)—shows that much of his work was not overtly Jewish in theme.

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What is missing from these reviews is a reflection on how this sense of not being in full spectatorial and interpretive control might relate to the themes of the works reviewed. Indeed, one might frame these and similar responses to Kosky’s earlier work in terms of both a resistance to and a desire for the position of outsider, for the experience of a sense of exclusion from meaning. On one hand, Kosky’s Jewish references in Jewish-themed productions exposed a divide among non-Jewish reviewers as to the extent to which they were willing to feel temporarily like an outsider in religious and cultural terms. Belshazzar and The Wilderness Room both have as central themes the difficulty of making and grasping meaning and the sense of dislocation that comes from being unable to understand something that clearly does have meaning if only one could interpret it correctly. Responses to these works exposed a different divide among reviewers, this time as to how much they desired the position of outsider in theatrical terms. In this case, the position of outsider, situated emotionally and spatially beyond the dramatic world, provides a privileged viewing stance that allows audiences to observe characters who experience the difficulties of making meaning from symbols, while not sharing that experience themselves. In such works, an acceptance of the role of insider requires an unusually vulnerable audience stance characterised by a willingness to receive the pieces experientially, sharing the difficulties of meaning-making with the characters. Kosky’s willingness to provide explicatory material that might be engaged with only after the performance was a demonstration that these pieces were not nihilist— meaning is attainable providing one has the key, whether that is Daniel’s ability to interpret God’s disembodied handwriting in Belshazzar or a theatre programme’s notes. This vulnerable experiential audience stance was not one that Australian theatre at the time generally demanded, expected, invited or, as some of these reviews suggest, understood even as existing as an option. However, that Kosky’s productions often remain incomplete without additional processing is a key feature of his work. His work thus begins in the theatre, but does not usually end there. This can take a number of forms. On one hand, as in the above examples, audiences might share with onstage characters a sense of struggling for meaning during the performance, which is then resolved by reading and other processing after the event. On another, Charlotte Farrell analyses how Kosky obstructs catharsis in The Lost Echo, The Women of Troy and King Lear: audiences are not given the opportunity to purge their emotions within the running time of a production. This is not to all tastes: as two letters of complaint about King Lear to Brisbane’s Courier-Mail read, “I am haunted by images of violence and inhuman acts . . . [I] feel grief that, instead of a lasting feeling of compassion, pathos and an appreciation of family obligation, I am left with horrid images of blood, human waste, cruelty and an overwhelming feeling of bleakness” (Williams 1998); “I was not shocked by the Queensland Theatre Company’s avant-garde production of King Lear but saddened. It upset me that the producer . . . placed more emphasis on its vicious cruelty than on scenes of remorse and compassion” (Brier 1998).

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Fig. 1.7 Stolpersteine commemorating Jewish victims of the Nazi regime outside the Komische Oper Berlin. © John R. Severn

In his recent work on jazz operettas, Kosky has taken another approach. As he says in an interview in relation to his production of Jaromír Weinberger’s operetta Frühlingsstürme: I believe that we at the Komische Oper in Berlin have a duty to bring this lost and forgotten part of Berlin’s musical history back to the city. And in doing so, I’m as far from pushing any educational agenda as I am from any kind of nostalgia. We’re not doing it because the majority of the artists who worked on these pieces were Jews who had to suffer persecution, expulsion, exile or even death, but because the piece and the music are outstanding. Nobody in the auditorium should be thinking about the tragic fate of Jaromír Weinberger during the performance. There’s the opportunity for that in the interval or at home after the performance. During the performance the audience should be experiencing a wonderful, highly emotional piece of theatre, a thrilling, riveting, crazy story with fantastic music. Because this music is the sound of Berlin. It’s not Jewish or German-Jewish music, it’s German music that was regarded as part of German culture by the people who made it (Lenz 2020).

For Kosky, to do justice to these works that were silenced by the Nazi regime, they need to be allowed to speak in their own voice. To respect them as art in the world is to grant them their identity as entertainment during their time on stage. However, their identity as entertainment is also a prompt for audiences to consider their stage history after the show and during the interval. Alongside contextualising information in programme books, three incentives to remember the fate of the artists who collaborated in 1930s jazz operetta are embedded in the pavement outside the opera house. On 30 January 2015, before the premiere of the revival of Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, Kosky oversaw the laying of Stolpersteine (brass plaques inlaid into the pavement, commemorating victims of the Nazi regime) commemorating three Jewish employees of the former Metropol-Theater that occupied the site now occupied by the Komische Oper. These demonstrate the range of Nazi policies as well as the range of collaborators necessary to make an operetta: Kuba Reichmann, concertmaster, escaped to the USA; Hans Walter Schapira, librarian and inspector, interned in a mental institution and

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murdered as part of the Nazi so-called euthanasia programme; Fritz Spira, actor and singer, murdered in a Nazi concentration camp (Fig. 1.7). The work that begins in Kosky’s theatre but ends elsewhere does not restrict itself to processing, reconsidering, reflecting, remembering. Sometimes the Komische Oper provides a clear route from feeling to action: at the end of Kosky’s production of the jazz operetta Märchen im Grand Hotel, Ulrich Lenz, the production’s dramaturg interrupted the applause to explain why the production was so small-scale: the composer Paul Ábrahám wrote it after being forced to flee Berlin for Vienna, where he no longer had access to a full opera company or orchestra. Pointing out that had Ábrahám received no support as a refugee in Vienna, we would have had no Märchen im Grand Hotel, he invited audience members to donate to a Berlin charity for refugee mothers and children as we left the theatre. A similar event occurred after Kosky’s production of Anatevka, a version of Fiddler on the Roof performed in German and Yiddish, which ends with the main characters, a Jewish family, expelled from Anatevka, a Russian stetl. At the curtain call, the actor playing the central role of Tevye stepped forward and invited the audience to donate to a refugee charity, saying “Anatevka ist überall” (Anatevka is everywhere).

It Begins with the Theatre If the theatre’s questioning of the nation is to resonate with more than the susceptible subsection within its audiences, it cannot simply rely on what is on stage to do that work: it must both open itself up and ensure that as many barriers to participation as possible are reduced or removed. Transnational theatre does not happen only on stage: it also occurs within interpersonal encounters among audience members. In his role as Intendant of the Komische Oper Berlin since 2012, a role that combines that of an artistic director with the management of the opera house, Kosky is in a stronger position to engage with these practical aspects than when he is acting only as a director. The Komische Oper is the smallest of Berlin’s three opera houses, situated in the former East Berlin. A few years before Kosky took over as Intendant its productions were often seen as tired and dated, its ticket sales had dropped to barely sustainable levels, and it struggled to hire performers. Andreas Homoki, the Intendant at the time, decided that with nothing much to lose, the company would start employing young, experimental directors to change the house style, and it began engaging with potential audiences in unexpected places, in particular Berlin’s Turkish-German population, the city’s largest migrant community. As a result, when Kosky took over the helm of the Komische Oper from Homoki, the company was already geared towards change and had introduced measures to change its approach to its place in the city. Kosky has taken this momentum and turned the house into a site of community inclusion, a safe space for creatively imagining what constitutes community, and for a recuperation of the power of performance to facilitate difficult conversations about the current challenges to multicultural contemporary societies.

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As part of this, the Komische Oper Berlin under Barrie Kosky’s leadership has led the way in Germany and elsewhere in ensuring that those who might be interested in attending can do so with the minimum of obstacles, and in facilitating the chance of such interpersonal encounters. The Komische Oper’s commitment to accessibility has resulted in a significantly wider audience demographic than is usual in modern opera houses. This is partly due to its extensive and multifaceted outreach programme Selam Opera! aimed at Berlin’s Turkish community, in which, among other projects, members of the cast plus a small band including Turkish instruments take opera out of the opera house and into the community to, for example, a Turkish-majority nursing home, a language school, and Turkish social groups. Those unfamiliar with opera thus have the opportunity to experience it in familiar surroundings.11 Other initiatives of Selam Opera!, which is led by a Turkish-German member of staff and functions as a form of outreach-inreach programme, have included opening the opera house up to Turkish community events, so that community members feel familiar with the house; engagements with the Turkish-language Berlin press (for example, profiles of Turkish-German singers in the company); advertising on Turkish-language radio to ensure that the company’s children’s choir appears accessible to all; special family events and workshops for Turkish-German families; events for Turkish-German dads during children’s choir rehearsals. Among the multinational company, Tansel Akzeybek, a tenor soloist, is a prominent cast member with a Turkish background. One of the most noticeable features of the Komische Oper for first-time visitors is the presence of seatback translation devices in German, Turkish, English and French. At the time of Kosky’s appointment as Intendant, the opera house was undergoing renovation that included the installation of seat-back translation devices: one of Kosky’s conditions for accepting the role of Intendant was that the house committed to providing seatback translations and programme synopses in Turkish for all productions, rather than only in German and the tourist-friendly English and French. A feature that differentiates the Komische Oper under Kosky from many other opera companies is its radical rejection of exclusionary models of the community of which they are a part and with which they engage. In contrast to much discourse that conceptualises subsidised art as funded by a community of taxpayers to which it owes its primary duty, the company conceives of itself as having its primary relationship with the community of Berlin, a community comprising all that city’s residents, including children, the unemployed and those such as asylum seekers, legally barred from working and therefore paying income tax. As well as a policy of generally affordable ticket prices, the company provides extremely inexpensive €3 standby tickets for the young, the unemployed, asylum seekers and those on state benefits. (In contrast, Opera Australia in Sydney offers standby tickets at around ten times that amount to full-time Australian students only, and offers no concessions to the unemployed or those on other state benefits). As a result, operagoers are more

11

For extended details of Selam Opera!, see the essays in Komische Oper (2014).

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likely to encounter diversity in their encounters there than in other high cultural venues. Further, the Komische Oper Berlin has developed a self-conception that sees the company as an active contributor to public policy: it has formed co-operative partnerships with players in a range of policy sectors concerned with inclusive communities, expressly with the aim of contributing to the diverse community of Berlin beyond its own audiences. These range from Stadtteilmütter in Neukölln, a charity for migrant parents and families, the Hartnackschule, a language school, local and national AIDS charities, and the anti-racist and anti-homophobic campaigning organisation, Berliner Toleranzbündnis. This is highly unusual among opera companies, where co-operation tends to relate to funding and sponsorship. In contrast, the Komische Oper positions itself as both willing to change its practice in consultation with its policy-sector partners, and to contribute to those partners’ aims as a creator of practice-based knowledge on inclusive communities. Diversity here is neither a question of meeting quotas—people cannot be forced to like opera—nor a question of incorporating minorities into an otherwise unchanged “mainstream”. Instead, it is a question of transforming attitudes in the “mainstream” with the aim of creating an inclusive society that, amongst other aspects, recognises the transnational within the national. As important for the Komische Oper as the presence of diverse audiences is the message that its initiatives to make operagoing inclusive sends to “mainstream” audiences: that all Berliners, including Berlin’s minorities, have a right to participate in Berlin’s state-funded culture with as few obstacles as possible.

Structure and Contents The following chapters proceed roughly chronologically, beginning in the early 1990s. However, Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres is not primarily designed to be a history of Kosky’s work. Instead, it aims to provide a number of points of access to a complex and wide-ranging career. It therefore brings together eyewitness accounts from colleagues who have worked with Kosky, philosophical approaches, genre analysis, theatre theory, contextualising studies and a close reading, among others. It draws its examples from across Kosky’s career, including his work as a director of spoken theatre, opera, operetta and musicals—types of theatre that demand different skill sets of a director and that come with different sets of audience expectations—and as an administrator. Chapter 2 surveys the work of the Gilgul Ensemble, an independent theatre company established by Kosky in 1991 to investigate Jewish identity, history and performance. Across the six-year lifespan of the company, Gilgul created five works—The Dybbuk (1991), Es brent (1992), Levad (1993), The Wilderness Room (1994) and The Operated Jew (1996)—that cemented Kosky’s growing reputation as a director and theatre-maker. The authors, Yoni Prior and Matthew Delbridge, were members of the original ensemble and the chapter draws on interviews with

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past ensemble members to consider the idiosyncratic dramaturgy and collaborative working methods that forged the work, and the evolving stage language that developed across the span of the works. The chapter also reflects on the local and international cultural context out of which the company emerged, locating it in an historical moment when Australian (and especially Melbournian) theatre artists were responding explicitly to the diversity of the Australian population through investigations of narratives of migration, and the transmutation of languages, accents and traditions of originary cultures. The chapter describes how Gilgul’s work tended to the postmodern, multimodal, multilingual and self-reflexive, whilst cannily appropriating and adapting the high theatricality of past performance traditions. In Chap. 3, Jennifer McMahon invites the reader to consider the philosophical assumptions that underpin the early career aims and objectives of Barrie Kosky. The chapter stays with Kosky’s work in the late 1980s and 1990s, but expands the scope to include opera. Approaching this early work with the tools of analytic philosophy, McMahon guides us through Kosky’s “language” of opera, and the processes by which the audience is prompted to interpret it. The chapter explores the way in which Kosky creates mystery while avoiding fantasy and escapism, and how his work can express psychological truth while stimulating subjective interpretations. Drawing on examples from painting as a comparison, McMahon shows that Kosky’s œuvre demonstrates the evocation/communication of “aesthetic ideas”, a central concept in aesthetic theory regarding the processes involved in creative expression. Barrie Kosky’s work as an administrator is then the subject of Chap. 4. Here John Severn focuses on Kosky’s time as Artistic Director of the 1996 Adelaide Festival of Arts and how this relates to discourse and practice around art, taste and community in Australia. Aged twenty-six when his appointment was announced, Kosky was the festival’s youngest-ever appointment as Artistic Director. The first part of the chapter describes how Kosky demonstrated a competency with arts administration in ways that expanded the understanding of the role of Artistic Director beyond that shown by his predecessors, and how, as a rare example of a young practising artist rather than a seasoned professional arts administrator in the role of a successful Artistic Director, he paved the way for a string of practising artists at the Festival’s helm in subsequent years. The second part of the chapter frames the objections to Kosky’s Adelaide appointment in relation to other Australian approaches to season programming. The chapter asks: what does it mean for an arts organisation to provide something for everybody? It then argues that Kosky answers this by recognising a diversity of tastes undergirded by a shared orientation towards the new. The chapter ends by drawing links to Kosky’s later work in Berlin in relation to barriers to access to the arts. Chapters 5 and 6 return to Kosky’s work as a director, and move to the transitional time at the end of his career based in Australia and the beginning of his career based in Europe before taking the helm of the Komische Oper Berlin, during which he returned to Australia to direct two major works for the Sydney Theatre Company. In Chap. 5, Charlotte Farrell examines Kosky’s use of repetition in scenes from his 1998 touring production of King Lear for Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company, from The Lost Echo (2006), and from The Women of Troy (2008),

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the latter two for the Sydney Theatre Company. Farrell’s analyses reveal Kosky’s practice of staging a character’s encounters with trauma using dramaturgies of repetition that ultimately denied catharsis to that character and also, by extension, to the audience. Drawing on theatre theory as well as trauma theory, Farrell considers the relationship between Kosky’s use of repetition, his staging of characters’ encounters with trauma, and the subsequent denial of catharsis in specific scenes. In doing so, she accounts for a central dramaturgical mechanism in Kosky’s work—repetition—and its impact. When asked in an interview if he had ever staged a production without music, Barrie Kosky’s response was a definitive “no”. What, then, does this do to the genre of the work he produces? Are even his “spoken” theatre productions forms of opera or music theatre? In Chap. 6, Mara Davies considers this question in relation to The Women of Troy, an exemplar of his particular approach to the use of music in theatrical productions staged in contexts where audiences might expect a more straightforwardly “spoken” theatre. Davis describes how Kosky inserted a wide variety of vocal music, ranging wildly in style, national origin and compositional period, into the terse adaptation of Euripides’s The Trojan Woman by Tom Wright, who also served as the production’s dramaturg. The selections include John Dowland songs, arias from the operatic repertoire, Slovenian folk song, American popular song, and more. This music, rather than playing a subsidiary role, equalled the text in importance. Did this mean that Kosky had rendered the Euripides text an opera? Drawing on research interviews Davis has carried out with Tom Wright and Darryl Wallis, the pianist for The Women of Troy, this chapter argues that The Women of Troy is operatic rather than opera. In doing so, Davis articulates Kosky’s sophisticated engagement with operatic tropes and conventions, and how he reconfigures them for a dramatic context. With Chap. 7, we return to a philosophical approach to Kosky’s work. In a chapter that takes into account Kosky’s work as a director of musicals and the reviver and director of jazz operettas at the Komische Oper Berlin as well as his Australian productions, James Phillips engages with the concept of the grotesque in Kosky’s work from the viewpoint of continental philosophy. Phillips argues that while Kosky’s productions are at times exorbitantly stagey, what stops them from tipping over into mere spectacle is the grotesque. Their garishness undercuts the innocuous make-believe of show business without reasserting the norms of everyday life. It is a way of making spectacle serious but not humourless, of pushing spectacle into ecstasy and surprise. Phillips demonstrates how this strain in Kosky’s work communicates with the grotesque tradition of Australian comedy (Sir Les Patterson, Kath & Kim), just as it connects with the utopianism Mikhail Bakhtin theorised in relation to the carnivalesque and Theodor Adorno in relation to the messianic. Phillips shows how by means of the grotesque Kosky situates his Australian work within a recognisably Australian theatrical ethos and simultaneously articulates a critique of Australian society. Kosky’s critical side has been less pronounced in his productions as head of the Komische Oper Berlin (2012–), but it has not disappeared. His revivals of pre-1933 operettas have bucked against post-war scheduling and directorial trends that, in effect, endorsed the Nazis’ suppression of

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these works. In its non-intellectualism, Phillips argues, the grotesque is a form of critique that can inhabit and employ the superficial and the glitzy. As this chapter shows, it can make an operetta an indictment of the times without slipping into didacticism. Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been, and remains one of the most controversial works in the operatic canon. In 2017, Barrie Kosky broke new ground by being the first foreign director—indeed, the first non-member of the extended Wagner family—to direct the opera at the Bayreuth Festival. He was also the first Jewish director to do so. Chapters 8 and 9 broach the complexities of Wagner’s opera and Kosky’s staging of it by approaching them from a range of angles. In Chap. 8, Michael Halliwell contextualises Wagner’s opera in the discourses of antisemitism around the work itself, and also in its stage history. The chapter then investigates how Kosky has confronted the dark legacy of this monumental work, interrogating many of its deeply disturbing elements while finding a way to strikingly dramatize these fault lines in the opera. The chapter demonstrates that Kosky’s production achieves a profound vision of the role of art in a deeply politicized society; one distrustful of the “other”, and constantly seeking scapegoats. While the Nazi past looms large over this production—some of it set in Courtroom 600, the site of the post-war Nuremberg trials—it also unflinchingly, and often darkly comically, addresses contemporary political and social issues. Halliwell further contextualises Kosky’s production by contrasting it with the highly controversial 2010 Bayreuth version directed by Katharina Wagner, the composer’s greatgranddaughter, a production that starkly divided the critics, but which offers a very different, and equally fascinating perspective to that of Kosky’s production. Chapter 9 then serves as a companion to Michael Halliwell’s work. In it, John Severn uses a close reading of Kosky’s production of Die Meistersinger to demonstrate Kosky’s techniques of staging and structuring, especially repetition and doubling, and his theatrical modes of argumentation and rhetoric. This draws on the theme of repetition as a feature of Kosky’s direction discussed in Jennifer McMahon’s theorising of Kosky’s early Australian work in Chap. 3 and Charlotte Farrell’s discussions of his later Australian work in Chap. 5. Severn adds to McMahon’s and Farrell’s analyses to demonstrate Kosky’s continuing use of repetition and doubling as flexible tools rather than as directorial tics that can easily be either understood as signifying in a fixed way or dismissed as primarily a stylistic feature. As Severn demonstrates, this is not a production that draws a clear causal trajectory between Wagner, his works and the Nazi regime. Although the production stages an amalgam of Wagner and his character Hans Sachs in the witness stand in Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg trials, the production is not a show trial of Wagner with a foregone conclusion: instead, it is an invitation to exercise our faculty of judgment rather than pass sentence, and, importantly, to experience the challenges of judging the past while not avoiding our responsibilities to the future by rejecting this as simply too hard. The book ends with an appendix that sets out a selected list of 110 of Barrie Kosky’s productions.

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References AfD. (2016). Manifesto for Germany: The Political Programme of the Alternative for Germany. Becker, T. (2014). Inszenierte moderne: Populäres theater in Berlin und London, 1880-1930. Munich: De Gruyter. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Abingdon: Routledge. Brier, H. (1998). Letter. Courier-Mail, 6 October. Carlson, M. (2008). The realistic theatre and bourgeois values, 1750-1900. In S. Williams & M. Hamburger (Eds.), A history of German theatre (pp. 92–119). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carmody, J. (1993). Soul-shaking opus of optimism. Sun Herald, 17 October. Carroll, S. (1994). Jews in a New World Exodus. Sunday Age, 11 December. Courier-Mail. (1935). Oskar Denes in Brisbane. Actor who triumphed over languages. CourierMail, 28 March. Croggon, A. (1990). Babylon in Confusion. The Bulletin, 14 August. Everyones. (1934). Glamorous Delysia Scores in Mother of Pearl. Everyones, 17 October. Everyones. (1935). Ball at the Savoy is a Triumph for Denes. Everyones, 10 July. Fraser, C. (1998). Come to Dazzle: Sarah Bernhardt’s Australian Tour. Sydney: Currency Press. Freeman, J. (1987). Not all is rosy in this garden. Newspaper clipping (source not otherwise noted) held in the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne with reference number 2010.007.016A. Frey, S. (2019). Going global: The International Spread of Viennese Silver Age Operetta. In A. Belina & D. B. Scott (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Operetta (pp. 89–102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garde, U. (2007). Brecht & Co.: German-speaking Playwrights on the Australian Stage. Bern: Peter Lang. Garde, U. (2009). Spaces for performing belonging: The use of lieux de mémoire in Jewish migrant theatre and the work of Barrie Kosky. In U. Garde & A.-R. Meyer (Eds.), Belonging and exclusion: Case studies in recent Australian and German literature, film and theatre (pp. 26–44). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Garde, U., & Severn, J. R. (2021). Theatre and internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and beyond. Abingdon: Routledge. Komische Oper Berlin. (2014). Selam Opera! Interkultur im Kulturbetrieb. Berlin: Henschel. Komische Oper Berlin. (2018). Oper Jung!: Musiktheater für Kinder zwischen Bühne und Bildung. Berlin: Henschel. Lenz, U. (2020). Interview with Barrie Kosky. Booklet accompanying Jaromír Weinberger, Frühlingsstürme, DVD. Dir. Barrie Kosky, cond. Jordan de Souza. Berlin: Naxos, 2.110677-78. Lessing, G. E. (1767–1769). Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Vol. 2). Hamburg: Cramer. Levin, D. J. (1997). Reading a staging/staging a reading. Cambridge Opera Journal, 9(1), 47–71. Love, H. (Ed.). (1984). The Australian Stage: A Documentary History. Kensington: New South Wales University Press. McMillin, S. (2006). The musical as drama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Minor, R. (2015). Operetta Dramaturgies Today? On Barrie Kosky’s Ball im Savoy. In B. BrandlRisi, C. Risi, & Komische Oper Berlin (Eds.), Kunst der Oberfläche: Operette zwischen Bravour und Banalität (pp. 208–210). Berlin: Henschel. Mitchell, T. (1995a). Adelaide Ristori Tours Australia, 22 July-4 December 1875 [Part One]. Australasian Drama Studies, 26, 178–199. Mitchell, T. (1995b). Adelaide Ristori Tours Australia. Part 2: “High Art” and “Low Purse”. Australasian Drama Studies, 27, 123–141. Monteverdi, C., & Kats-Chernin, E. (2013). Orpheus. Odysseus. Poppea. Dir. Barrie Kosky, cond. André de Ritter, Komische Oper Berlin. DVD. Berlin: ArtHaus Musik, 109078. O’Connell, C. (1990). Musical briskness and passion amid fog. The Age, 3 August.

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Platt, L., Becker, T., & Linton, D. (2014). Popular musical theatre in London and Berlin 1890 to 1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. E., & Landolt, P. (2017). Commentary on the study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40, 1486–1491. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1308528. Radic, L. (1994). Jewish experience lost in symbolism. The Age, 2 December. Richards, A., & Prior, Y. (2002). Into the Wilderness: Gilgul’s Physical Theatre, 1994. Australian Drama Studies, 41, 28–49. Rocke, S. (2021). Chinese opera and racism in colonial victoria 1853-1870. In J. W. Davidson, M. Halliwell, & S. Rocke (Eds.), Opera, emotion, and the antipodes (Historical perspectives: creating the metropolis, delineating the other) (Vol. 1, pp. 209–232). Abingdon: Routledge. Schiller, F. (1822). Die Schaubühne, als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet. In vol. 17, Sämtliche Werke (pp. 39–54). Carlsruhe: Büreau der deutschen Classiker. Scott, D. B. (2019). German Opera on Broadway and in the West End, 1900-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Severn, J. R. (2021a). 1930s jazz operetta and internationalization then and now: risks, ethics, aesthetics. In U. Garde & J. R. Severn (Eds.), Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (pp. 37–54). Abingdon: Routledge. Severn, J. R. (2021b). Opera-to-opera adaptation Revived: Barrie Kosky and Elena Kats-Chernin’s Monteverdi Trilogie at the Komische Oper Berlin, instrumentation, localisation and community. Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 14(3) (forthcoming). Siebs, T. (1898). Deutsche Bühnenaussprache. Berlin: Albert Ahn. Sissons, D. C. S. (1999). Japanese acrobatic troupes touring Australasia 1867-1900. Australasian Drama Studies, 35, 73–107. Sosulski, M. J. (2007). Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Burlington, VA: Ashgate. Stone, B. (2021). Migration and Theatre in Berlin: The Maxim Gorki Theater and the Komische Oper Berlin. In U. Garde & J. R. Severn (Eds.), Theatre and Internationalisation: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (pp. 199–214). Abingdon: Routledge. Sydney Morning Herald. (1935). Mr Oskar Denes. Hungarian Comedian Arrives. Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March. Sydney Theatre Company. (2020). “Q&A: Upton on The Maids.” Retrieved April 4, 2020, from https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/posts/2013/june/qa-upton-on-the-maids. Throsby, D. (2010). The economics of cultural policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Sternberg, J. (1932). Blonde Venus. With Marlene Dietrich. DVD. Los Angeles: Universal, 8250175. Williams, K. (1998). Letter. Courier-Mail, 30 September. Williams, M. (2021). Smoking opium, puffing cigars, and drinking gingerbeer: Chinese opera in Australia. In J. W. Davidson, M. Halliwell, & S. Rocke (Eds.), Opera, emotion, and the antipodes (Historical perspectives: creating the metropolis; delineating the other) (Vol. 1, pp. 166–208). Abingdon: Routledge. Zhengting, W. (2012). The Gangzhou Yueju Quyishe (Gangzhou Society Cantonese Opera Group) in Melbourne, Australia. In N. Ng (Ed.), Encounters: Musical Meetings Between China and Australia (pp. 3–19). Toowong: Australian Academic Press.

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James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford University Press 2005), The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford University Press 2007) and Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle (Oxford University Press 2019) as well as the editor of Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (Stanford University Press 2008). John R. Severn is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, where he collaborates on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the economic and cultural value of theatre in Australia. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical (Routledge 2019) and co-editor with Ulrike Garde of Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (Routledge 2021). From 2017–2020 he was a Macquarie University Research Fellow with a project entitled “Beyond Cultural Borders: Barrie Kosky’s Rethinking of Community in Artistic and Practical Terms”. His wider research covers adaptation, opera, musical theatre and community.

Chapter 2

“Very Much a Laboratory”: Barrie Kosky and the Gilgul Ensemble 1991–1997 Yoni Prior and Matt Delbridge

Abstract This chapter surveys the work of the Gilgul Ensemble, an independent theatre company established by Barrie Kosky in 1991 to investigate Jewish identity, history and performance. Across the six-year lifespan of the company, Gilgul created five works that cemented Kosky’s growing reputation as a director and theatremaker of uncommon vision and boldness. The authors, Yoni Prior and Matthew Delbridge, were members of the original ensemble and the chapter draws on interviews with past ensemble members to consider the idiosyncratic dramaturgy and collaborative working methods that forged the work, and the evolving stage language that developed across the span of the works. The chapter also reflects on the local and international cultural contexts out of which the work emerged, locating it in an historical moment when Australian (and peculiarly Melbournian) theatre artists were responding explicitly to the diversity of the Australian population through investigations of narratives of migration, and the transmutation of languages, accents and traditions of originary cultures. This work tended to the postmodern, multi-modal, multi-lingual and self-reflexive, whilst cannily appropriating and adapting the high theatricality of past performance traditions.

In this chapter we survey the work of Barrie Kosky with Gilgul Theatre, a company he co-founded with producer and lighting designer, Robert Lehrer, in 1991. The company created five works of theatre before informally disbanding in 1997. We focus on the context out of which the company emerged in relation to contemporaneous performance tendencies, its idiosyncratic approaches to dramaturgy and performance composition, and we reflect on the legacy of this body of work. We draw, and build, upon previously published research by Yoni Prior (1998), Prior and

Y. Prior (*) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Delbridge Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_2

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Fig. 2.1 Barrie Kosky directing The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

Alison Richards (2002, 2008) and Charlotte Farrell (2017), but amplify these analyses in our use of first-person accounts of the process by which the work of the company was made, under Kosky’s direction. The authors were members of the ensemble, but also interview other members of the company. A significant voice is absent. Peter Corrigan was resident collaborator and designer with the company, and passed away in 2016. His contribution is evident in testimony about him, and in images of actors’ bodies in dialogue with his cruel and evocative spaces. Nonetheless, the authors’ lived experience of the creation of the company and the making of the works offer a privileged lens on company dynamics, processes and the experience of its successes and (arguable) failures. Critically, we contend that Kosky’s work with Gilgul served to develop his growing reputation as a director and theatremaker of uncommon vision and boldness, but also provided a laboratory on the margins of the mainstream in which he could explore and extend that vision with boldness (Fig. 2.1).

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Establishment of the Gilgul Ensemble Emerging theatre director Barrie Kosky and his friend Robert Lehrer, a lighting designer and producer, assembled a diverse group of artists around them to produce The Dybbuk—the inaugural production of their recently founded company, Gilgul Theatre in May of 1991. Derived from the Hebrew word meaning “revolution”, “rolling” or “metamorphosis”, the word “gilgul” is also used in mystical writings to describe reincarnation or the transmigration of souls. Kosky’s desire to strike out on his own was spurred by a confluence of circumstances. Travel to Germany and Eastern Europe, and his work on transforming the Handel oratorio Belshazzar into a staged work at Melbourne’s Theatreworks in 1990, had prompted Kosky to probe his Jewish cultural heritage, leading to a period of research into twentieth-century Jewish history, Jewish mystical writings and Jewish theatre. Frustrated with the limitations (and some hostility) he had encountered in realising his already eclectic approach within more traditional opera and theatre companies, and unable to secure ongoing funding for his own opera and theatre company, Treason of Images, Kosky determined to create an independent space within which he could explore Jewish identity, culture and history in and through performance. Gilgul formed as an occasional ensemble of collaborators from a variety of cultural and theatrical backgrounds, working on a project-to-project basis. One of the salient features, and arguably the strength, of the ensemble was its diversity. Kosky, commenting in Melissa Rymer’s documentary film Kosky in Paradise (Rymer 1996) said of its composition: No one’s had the same training. No one’s had the same background. No one has the same outlook on life—the same sort of world view . . . and normally that’s a disaster. Somehow magically it just seems to work.

Most were then aged in their early twenties—Kosky was 23. None had a conventional training in theatre, nor had Kosky worked extensively with any of the company members. Tom Wright and Michael Kantor had been his peers at the University of Melbourne and, aside from their experience and abilities as performers, they brought a range of salient skills to the performance-making process. Wright had worked as performer, dramaturg, editor, and/or writer on a number of student and Fringe theatre productions. Kantor had directed and devised a number of performances and studied mime and bouffon at Le Coq in Paris. Elisa Gray brought with her a fluency in the Yiddish language, experience in the long-established amateur Yiddish theatre in Melbourne, and a grounded understanding of Jewish culture, religion and history. Louise Fox had worked as a founding member—along with artists such as Julian Meyrick and Paul Capsis—of Kickhouse Theatre, a company dedicated to the production of new Australian theatre writing. Yoni Prior had worked as an actor, director and theatre-maker in Australia, but also brought experience of both contemporary and classic Jewish performance gained during four years working in repertory theatre in Israel. Rosalie Zycher, who appeared in Es Brent, was an experienced director, also fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew. Matthew Delbridge was, at that time, a student of Drama at Rusden State College who entered the company as

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director’s assistant and added to that role sound and lighting operator and production manager for the life of the company. Veteran stage designer and architect, Peter Corrigan, who had worked across experimental and mainstream stages for several decades, designed each of the works. A general manifesto was published in the company’s first theatre programme stating the company’s aims as being “to establish Australia’s first professional Jewish theatre company and to expose Jewish and non-Jewish audiences to an artistic expression of the particular complexity and diversity of the Australian diaspora” (Gilgul Theatre 1991). In practice, Gilgul’s “professional” status was an ambit claim and its first two productions were supported through donations and in-kind support from the Jewish community, and were dependent on the contributions of collaborators who worked with no expectation of financial reward. Later productions were fully or partly funded by grants from the Australian federal arts funding agency, The Australia Council, and partnerships with presenting organisations such as Playbox Theatre and Belvoir St Theatre. Following the success of its early works, Gilgul was encouraged to apply for ongoing subsidy, but the company elected to assemble to create specific projects and then disperse to work in other contexts, other activities and on other projects. Not only was the company’s status as “professional” debatable: several company members were not Jewish. Interviewed in 1995, Wright framed this as important to the mission and integrity of the company, stating that the diverse composition of the ensemble indicated that Kosky’s “appreciation of these issues was intellectual and theatrical as much as it was personal” (Rymer 1996). In interviews and recorded conversations with the authors carried out in 2020, the ensemble members reflected on the changes wrought in relation to identity politics and cultural authenticity in the intervening 25 years: LOUISE FOX. If you tried to construct a Gilgul company now, you couldn’t do it without having every single person in it be entirely Jewish. It would be so much more about the identities or the proclaimed identities of the people who made the work. You (Tom) wouldn’t be in the company. Michael wouldn’t be in the company. Yoni wouldn’t be in the company. I probably wouldn’t even make it into the company. It would be Lis on stage singing to herself.1

A general manifesto, published in the company’s first theatre programme, detailed the company’s aims: • To establish Australia’s first professional Jewish theatre company. • To provide an innovative, enriching and stimulating artistic focus for young Jewish performers drawing upon Jewish history and culture, current Jewish concerns and the particular complexity and diversity of the Australian diaspora. • To provide an opportunity for non-Jewish audiences to experience Jewish culture in a form previously unseen in Australia. 1

Recorded conversation between Matt Delbridge, Louise Fox, Elisa Gray, Michael Kantor, Yoni Prior and Tom Wright, 3 July 2020. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from Louise Fox, Elisa Gray, Michael Kantor, Yoni Prior and Tom Wright are from this conversation.

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• To satisfy the continuing need for knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment within the Jewish community by exploring these concerns within an artistic environment. (Gilgul Theatre 1991).

Works Produced 1991–1997 Over the six-year lifespan of the company, Gilgul staged five original theatre works in what might be identified as two phases. While the Exile Trilogy (1991–1993) set the pattern for complex and intertextual formal and narrative structures that persisted through all of the company’s works, each of these three early works was grounded in texts from the canon of Yiddish theatre and Jewish performance culture. Fragments of the canonical texts bled into, were interwoven, or were intercut with songs from the Yiddish theatre and from ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust, from biblical texts, and quotations or reconstructions from Jewish ritual, literature, biography and history. The meta-structure connecting the three works portrayed the dislocated souls of (fictional) performers from the pre-war European Yiddish theatre “travelling somewhere between the fact of death, and the extinction of consciousness, where they are compelled to recreate fragments of their life-histories, and performances they have given” (Prior 1998, p. 17). The location of the performance within a space of the memory, rather than the recreation, of history permitted the dramaturgy to exploit distortions of, and refractions between, canonical text, historical fact, subjective memory, conjecture and imagining. In chronological order, the works comprising the Exile Trilogy were: • The Dybbuk (1991, 1992, 1993) based on the The Dybbuk by S. Anski (1979), (authored between 1913 and 1916). Venues: Town Hall Motors, St Kilda and Eveleigh Rail Workshop, Redfern, Sydney (Fig. 2.2). • Es Brent (1992, 1993) based on The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel (Wiesel 1979). It also referenced the festival of Purim, the folk theatre of the purimshpil and the song of the same name by Mordechai Gebirtig. Venues: Town Hall Motors, St Kilda, Melbourne and Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney (Fig. 2.3). • Levad (1993) made extensive quotation from Jacob Gordin’s 1898 play Mireleh Efros, “originally titled The Yiddish Queen Lear” (Rosenfeld 1977), translated into English for the production by Yoni Prior. It also drew on historical and biographical research into the Yiddish theatre conducted by Kosky and Prior in Tel Aviv and Melbourne. Venues: Playbox Theatre, Melbourne and Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney (Fig. 2.4). The second phase produced two works, created three years apart which left behind core texts and citations from the canon of Yiddish theatre, and drew on a broader range of more eclectic sources. These included theatre and social history, popular culture, antisemitic literature, cultural history, transcripts of war crimes trials, popular culture and Jewish religious and traditional texts and rituals. The

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Fig. 2.2 The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: John Gollings. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Fig. 2.3 Es Brent. 1992 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

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Fig. 2.4 Levad. 1993 Image: Jeff Busby

Yiddish songs, however, remained—as did the visible presence of Kosky behind the piano (or harpsichord) as accompanist and de facto conductor. These works were: • The Wilderness Room (1994) based on research by Rabbi John Levi on the thirteen Jewish convicts transported to Australia on the First Fleet of British colonists in 1788 (Levi 1974), on the Passover ritual, and on songs composed in the nineteenth century by Australia’s first resident Jewish composer, Isaac (later Sir Isaac) Nathan. Venue: Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Prahran, Melbourne (Fig. 2.5). • The Operated Jew (1997) was developed in a dialectic space between Oskar Panizza’s antisemitic 1893 novella The Operated Jew (Panizza 1991) and Sander Gilman’s book of essays on nineteenth-century rhetoric and pseudoscientific doctrines about racial difference, The Jew’s Body (Gilman 1991). Venue: Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne (Fig. 2.6).

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Fig. 2.5 The Wilderness Room, 1995 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

Fig. 2.6 The Operated Jew. 1997 Image: John Gollings

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Dramaturgical and Compositional Processes Good theatre is composed, not written. Musical forms are an analogy—any lighting designer will tell you that what they are doing is composing with light and space” (Barrie Kosky, quoted in Richards and Prior 2002, p. 34)

Despite the absence of a shared language of, or approach to making performance, Kosky was able to draw together the diverse networks of cultural reference and experience of the group into modes of composing performance that capitalised on the inherent eclecticism of members’ contributions. What the artists had in common was an intellectual commitment to complex conceptual schema, an investment in both inhabiting and investigating outsiderness and, in the Exile Trilogy in particular, a willingness to mine the location of the company and the work on the margins of mainstream theatre culture for material. The mise en abyme of these works, in which the performers played actors playing roles in an historical version of the canonical text, both exposed and exploited an ambivalence among the members regarding orthodox regimes of training, their legitimacy as performers, and the imagined culture of the “profession”. This shared scepticism regarding any form of orthodoxy, whether the tried-and-true processes of “professional” mainstream practice, or the charismatic quasi-religious procedures of the self-consciously experimental, inflected the focussed work on creating image, action, allusion and score (Fig. 2.7). As Richards and Prior note, it is also the case that the company’s “ways of working. . . developed organically, in response to available resources” (Richards and Prior 2008, p. 232). The first two works of the Exile Trilogy, The Dybbuk and Es Brent, were created and presented in an abandoned and filthy motor repair shop in St Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne with a large Jewish population. Unfettered use of the space was a pro bono contribution by its owner, and the artists also worked pro

Fig. 2.7 Rehearsing The Wilderness Room 1995 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

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bono with rehearsals taking place at nights and on weekends to fit around other wage-earning activities. A benefit of this straitened situation, however, was the luxury of long development periods, rigorous experimentation and gaps between work sessions to review and reflect on the work as it evolved within the given features of the space. In the case of The Dybbuk, rehearsals commenced in May with no performance date set, and we worked on the piece until we felt it was ready to open in November. ROBERT LEHRER. Town Hall Motors was between the religious communities and the old sort of Acland Street kind of Jewish community. There it sat, Town Hall Motors, you couldn’t have been more in the heart of Jewish Melbourne. And that just came fortunately to us.2

A pattern for the composition of the works was set early, with Kosky beginning each process by offering not a complete vision, but an eclectic array of materials— texts, narratives, histories, music, images, objects—that were investigated, transposed, intercut, edited or left intact, spoken or sung in Yiddish, Hebrew and English, and supplemented with new materials or original texts as ideas or gaps emerged. Bold design provocations offered by Peter Corrigan were also in play. In most cases (with the possible exception of The Operated Jew), each work was anchored in an existing text or historical narrative (see above), which created a spine against and around which other narrative threads, citations and allusions—textual and physical— were juxtaposed, woven and layered. Work moved between table and floor as needed, with Kosky joining loose improvisations for the creation of texts or accompanying songs and improvising a musical score on the battered company piano. Improvisations were less likely to be structured according to established devising processes than to rove between discussion and debate and “writing on the floor” to flesh or test out an imagined scene or image. LOUISE FOX. My memory is that we would try things and then he would go away. And in the interim, in the space that wasn’t rehearsal, he would decide whether he liked it or didn’t like it . . . He would come back with a whole new idea and maybe you would get an echo of something that we’d done in the next set of exercises or whatever that was. But there was a collating in all of this. I felt like we were very much a laboratory.

The emerging dramaturgy towards a heightened and physically demanding performance style relied on work with features of the space and the objects, costumes, contraptions and machines offered by the extraordinary and maverick theatrical intelligence of designer Peter Corrigan. Stage action was often difficult and dangerous, and much time was spent working out whether the ideas and images in our heads were even physically possible. The Dybbuk featured daredevil feats with, in and on wheelbarrows, piles of potatoes, a ceiling-height wedding dress and butcher’s hooks suspended from the roof joists (Fig. 2.8). At the centre of the design for Es Brent was an assembly of metal posts, beams and ladders (replacing an industrialstyle seesaw that was junked when we couldn’t make it do much more than ascend

2 Recorded conversation between Matt Delbridge and Robert Lehrer, 8 June 2020. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from Robert Lehrer are from this interview.

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Fig. 2.8 The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

and descend), constructed by the performers mid-performance, and around which they/we then crawled and swung while wearing pig masks.3 Levad saw the performer trudge incessantly along open metal pipes and through foot-deep rock salt, before being doused in filthy water and disappearing through the top of a massive wooden mill. The safe execution of these feats required precise choreography and timing which made much of the compositional process extremely practical and logistical as performers effectively folded the work of stagehands manipulating set objects into the performance score. As such, the concentration of the ensemble on the creation and construction of the material for performance meant that the mode of its expression as “Acting” was generally subsumed within the process of making (Fig. 2.9). ROBERT LEHRER. I think he did something that was incredibly special. Part of that formulation was the people he put around him, their willingness to do whatever needed to be done, including not getting paid properly and suffer under atrocious conditions some of the time. LOUISE FOX. Do you ever remember having a conversation with Barrie about character?

3 It is hard now to imagine making work in this way, and in these spaces. For good reason, occupational health and safety protocols have become increasingly strict in spaces where performers and audience encounter each other in physical proximity, and on work practices – making or performing—which are demanding or dangerous for performers’ mental or physical health.

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Fig. 2.9 Es Brent. 1993 Set after mid-performance construction Image: John Gollings. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne ELISA GRAY. No. LOUISE FOX. Ever? YONI PRIOR. When I think about the fetishism around “the organic” and “the process”, I feel like we made the work in pieces. There might have been that sort of deep immersion once we were in performance, but rehearsals were very workmanlike. You needed to be inside and outside at the same time and not worrying too much about whether your character would do that or not. And we didn’t really do “character”—except in a sort of citational sense. MICHAEL KANTOR. No, it was just, “Can it be faster? Is it possible?” ELISA GRAY. I look at my old scripts and it’s just screeds and screeds and screeds of directions. Grab the veil, put it around like a scarf, squat, spit in this direction . . . It was just trying to memorize that. TOM WRIGHT. My memory is that it was a sequence of tasks. And you could achieve the tasks more efficiently or better, but I didn’t feel any particular need to do anything more than just concentrate. I felt like I had to just concentrate so hard in those shows, because it was so rhythmically composed that you had to get into the music of the piece, which is a different thing from getting into the psychology of the piece.

The process generated enormous amounts of material, but editing was ruthless. Interviewed in 1994, following the difficult process that created The Wilderness Room, Kosky stated vigorously, “there’s no room for preciousness there” (Rymer 1996).

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YONI PRIOR. Didn’t we cut and remake fifteen minutes of Es Brent in a couple of hours before opening night? LOUISE FOX. We were always cutting. Like theatrical circumcision every day.

While stakes rose for later works, as the reputation of both Kosky and the company grew, they were low for early works. The Dybbuk was unfunded and Es Brent was funded by reinvesting the profits from the first and return seasons of The Dybbuk. The company put itself under no pressure to produce work that would realise a profit or forge a path to the mainstream. Led by Kosky, within parameters set by him, the group was working to realise an emerging collective vision of the sort of theatre that satisfied us. The real value of this freedom—particularly the long development periods and unfettered access to our own space—became evident when the company co-produced the third work of the trilogy, Levad with the (then) Playbox Theatre at the Malthouse Theatre. Although it signalled a step up in terms of the prominence of the company, and was the first subsidised production in which the team was paid, this was a far more gruelling process. The team was constrained to work with reduced development and rehearsal time, within a rigid schedule for design and marketing, and to develop the work in a rehearsal room rather than in the performance space.4 Following this difficult experience, the company returned to self-producing and to making on its own terms. Alison Richards, observing the company at work when making The Wilderness Room observed that “the company dynamic most closely resembled that of an archetypal Jewish family: contradictory, belligerent, argumentative, but ultimately democratic” (Richards and Prior 2008, p. 233). While the darkness and complexity of the works, and the physical virtuosity demanded of the performers suggested to some a singular, implacable and autocratic directorial vision, the culture of the company, and Kosky’s approach to its management, was essentially collaborative, robust, playful and somewhat chaotic. TOM WRIGHT. A lot was achieved by establishing a dynamic of play. We have shown you can produce quite serious and hard-edged stuff, and still maintain a high level of humour and light headedness within the rehearsal room.

Indeed, a good deal of the material and the inflection of the work in relation to the performance of culture was arrived at through play—or “mucking around”, as we dubbed it. The Exile Trilogy in particular was essentially theatre about theatre, made by artists acutely conscious of their location on the margins of a number of cultural fronts. In rehearsals we entertained each other with performances of artistic temperament, with the rhetoric of acting methodologies we considered passé, with references to age-old theatrical superstitions and rituals, with wilful anti-intellectualism. Standing at a distance from the ostensible subjects of our work—actors from the Yiddish Theatre and mainstream theatre culture—we were conscious that the old

4

For example, in order to contribute to marketing the annual season, the company needed to provide a name for the show as well as extensive marketing materials before work had even begun on its making.

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acting methods we parodied were also inauthentic, “imagined”, satirised—albeit with affection. “I don’t believe you!”, Barrie would shout. “But my character wouldn’t do that”, someone would shout back, and we would all chortle at the anachronistic directors and actors we identified ourselves against. Nonetheless, we derived enormous pleasure from the licence given to revel in histrionic behaviour which bordered on the infantile and folded this misbehaviour straight back into the performance score. “Mucking around” also drove the emergence of the peculiar representations of Jewishness that inflected the work. Despite its self-identification as a Jewish theatre company, several of its members were of non-Jewish or mixed ancestry. The “Jewishness” performed in the works was therefore a mongrel representation—a more nebulous constellation of received perceptions of a temperament, a history, a language, a set of rituals and archetypes. A vocabulary we all had in common came from the “stage Jews” we had all been exposed to, and those represented in the texts, images and films that were located in our research. In the rehearsal room, another less conscious dramaturgy was at work. Those who were Jewish performed “Jewishness” for those who were not. Those who were not Jewish performed their versions of Jewishness. Our evolving private rehearsal language became increasingly peppered with Yiddish and Hebrew words and phrases. As we worked on the making of scenes, those who were Jewish, or could “act Jewish”, were teaching the non-Jews a repertoire of schtick that folded the histrionics of the stage Jew and the ham actor in on one other, capitalising on the intense theatrical energy embedded in both kinds of embodiment. While Kosky proposed initial ideas and was responsible for final decisions, the way particular elements functioned in the overall composition emerged from the sort of deep collaboration that has become a hallmark of his work with artists. Multiple contributions from multiple perspectives made for theatre that was, as Richards and Prior attest, dense, weaving often oblique and partial references to texts, moments, traditions and performance genres in with those overtly used as the base resource for each work. This density was achieved by a long process of work on the floor . . . and the complex history of enquiry, contest and collaboration between the participants was the most obvious mark distinguishing Gilgul’s production relations from those maintained in the established organisations within which Kosky’s other work took place. It endowed the company’s members with a sense of agency and a familiarity with each other’s methods and perspectives that profoundly informed the rehearsal process (Richards and Prior 2002, p. 34).

In an interview in 2002, Louise Fox commented that the way the company worked framed the actor “as an investigative agent. It presumes you have a brain and a response and a contribution. It encourages performers’ intellectual responsibility for the piece and for their own performance” (Richards and Prior 2002, p. 44).

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Stage Language Gilgul developed a stage language initially bound by the overwhelming presence of Town Hall Motors in St Kilda, which evolved as Levad was developed for the Malthouse and the subsequent works The Wilderness Room and Operated Jew. The influence of the mechanics’ workshop on the company’s early development cannot be underestimated, and much of the initial aesthetic (that stayed with the company through its six-year period) emerged from an absorption of Town Hall Motors. Initially this influence can be traced through a material form of replication in Levad (corrugated iron, blue form construction steel, candlelight) and then into the strange cardboard/carpet world of Wilderness Room and finally the harsher steel(ed) environment of The Operated Jew. What is purposeful to note here, was the vital connection in all five works between the ensemble, the performance space and the introduced physical (and manipulable) environment(s) that Kosky, Corrigan, Lehrer, and the company developed for the works to thrive within. This stage language was inextricably linked to a physical and analogue manipulation of space and objects—in many ways an object-based performance language, that was a mainstay of the company’s unique contribution to theatre in Melbourne at the time. It was a theatre overtly and unashamedly theatrical, prior to our understanding and application of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s “postdramatic” (2006), but notably a theatre that used the language of its own form to propel its story. As previously discussed, and in the Exile Trilogy in particular, a driving characteristic of Gilgul’s work was the notion of “character” engaged in remembering how to “put on the show”, and it was this trope that became central to the performer’s mechanical reconstruction of the staging environments in all of the works. The ensemble, whether in the original Dybbuk, the solo Levad, or the trio in The Operated Jew, deployed a theatrical language of building and stage mechanics seminal to the work. The notion of “remembering” was strongest when sets were constructed, environments built, and props (re)discovered, as part of “the play” (Fig. 2.10).

Object-Based Theatre In all these works there was a heavy reliance on the presence (and use) of objects. These objects formed a vital aspect of Kosky’s Gilgul environment, sometimes part of the formal stage design (if it can be classified as formal), and often manipulable additions to character. Even with the stage technologies already available in the early/mid 1990s, there was an overwhelming sense of the analogue in all works, and audience experience was as much about the witnessing of construction, sometimes with objects literally drawn out of the dirt or salt, to the driving (and mechanical) pounding of an out-of-tune piano. The stage became machine, and the machine developed in terms of complexity with each new work. This machinic evolution was as much connected to the four venues/sites of performance as it was to Kosky

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Fig. 2.10 Es Brent. 1993 Image: John Gollings. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

(notwithstanding his extraordinary instinct) and the ensemble’s growth over the sixyear period. In spite of this change there remained a palpable and overwhelming sense for audiences of what the performance environment might ask of the performers next. In all works there was an element of theatrical magic at play—whether that was Prior’s ever extending bridal gown in The Dybbuk, or the ten-metre inflatable cancer consuming the stage in The Operated Jew, or the relentless gravy shower in Levad (following on from the hundreds of litres of other fluids Prior had to navigate and sing through in the work). The stage machine was a relentless, machinic beast, sometimes acting as puppeteer, other times as witness, but always present and often proving the power of the unexpected. There is no way to separate the impact of the Town Hall Motors building from the overall effect of the work, as it was as much a site of performance as it was a site of development—it was its own character, and many of the items/objects used in the first two works (Dybukk and Es Brent) sprang from this physical place. The aesthetic that emerged from Town Hall Motors was something that stayed with the company beyond the first two seasons, and often there was an attempt at replicating this environment (most telling from the Belvoir St season in the Redfern railyards), but more subtly in the development of Levad where a range of similar materials was installed into a traditional theatre. While it could be argued that something was lost in this translation, as we have suggested in terms of what happened to the company when it moved from its original home, much was also gained as the growing stage language of the company again responded to the resources of the environment.

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Fig. 2.11 Levad. 1993 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

One of the primary theatrical devices deployed in the solo work Levad, for example, was the presence of four different liquids: water, milk, blood and—for want of a better word—gunge. At various points during the work, three of the liquids (water, milk, blood) would run down a five-metre trough into a holding tank—a link to cleansing and the ritual of the mikveh bath, and the gunge (which was actually made of a gravy concoction) would pour over Prior towards the end of the performance via a shower above the tank as she performed one of the final songs in the show. Not many will be aware, but in the 1990s one of the innovative aspects of the Malthouse infrastructure was an air pressure system throughout the entire venue (Merlyn Theatre, Beckett Theatre and workshop) used in various ways to move heavy set pieces, open dock doors, and provide power to workshop tools, etc. It was this infrastructure that enabled literally hundreds of litres of fluid to be pumped into Corrigan’s environment each night, manually controlled by a series of taps on the balcony where the stage manager was located. This vital aspect of Levad could not have been realised without this Malthouse resource, and would have been unachievable in Town Hall Motors.5 (Fig. 2.11).

5

It is worth noting here that for each performance of Levad, 100 litres of milk (made from milk powder), 100 litres of fake blood (corn syrup, gelatine and food colouring) and 200 litres of Gunge (primarily made from gravy mix) needed to be premade in vats, and then the nearly 400 litres of this horrible mixture pumped out of the holding tank as part of the post-show clean up.

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The Ritual of Objects Many who recall witnessing a Gilgul work (and the authors have come to realise, given the relatively small number of shows produced over the years, how small this group actually is) speak of an overarching sense of ritual connected to the five plays (which we have briefly touched on already). A vital aspect of this sense of ritual comes from the presence of the objects used and their highly (and necessarily) controlled pre-set at the beginning of each work. Any stage technician will of course attest to the sense of ritual associated with a pre-set—however the necessary pre-set for a Gilgul production, while a laborious and time-consuming procedure, was also a fundamental aspect of the work’s capacity to be read as ritual. The list below shows some of the various objects vital to the works (Fig. 2.12). These objects variously became character, served as tools of torture or cleansing, illuminated the darkness, and became theatres within theatres—but were always critical to environmental shifts on the stage, agents of dramaturgical change, and assumed (at times) the presence of the ritually sacred: Potatoes (sometimes mouldy and sprouting) Wheelbarrow Oil Cans Butcher’s Hooks Oversized Yad(s) Masks/Wigs (Pig, Anubis) Cardboard Gravestones Party Hats Fridge/Freezer Boxes Soup Ladle Inflatable Cancer Rocks Fake foreskin(s), Blood Wooden Clappers Animal Suits Kookaburra Puppets Shabbat Candles Fake Pianos Rock Salt Gravel

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Fig. 2.12 The Operated Jew. 1997 Image: John Gollings

Audience and Critical Responses I’m not interested in the likes and dislikes of the audience. I’m interested in my likes and dislikes. I need an audience, but I need an audience that want to come on my ride, not the other way around. I think a lot of people in this country are led by the notion that the audience is somehow indicative of the work that should be done. (Barrie Kosky, address to the National Circus Convention, Powerhouse, Sydney, 2000)

Responses to the work were predictably divided, with a certain rapturous response from critics and audience to early works becoming increasingly critical through later works. This may have been because growing familiarity with the shock tactics of the dense hyper-theatricality engendered greater confidence in assessing the work, so that none of the company’s other work achieved the impact, novelty, or conceptual and artistic coherence of The Dybbuk and Es Brent. As collaborators on these projects, we may not be the best people to judge. For the taste-makers and audiences of Melbourne, with an appetite for boundary-pushing work, Gilgul’s performances were welcomed as a major injection of new energy. Within days of opening, it became very difficult to find a ticket. Veteran arts critic for Melbourne newspaper The Age, the late Helen Thompson, stated in a later interview that The Dybbuk “was such an extraordinary theatrical production that it would, for me, provide a new benchmark of theatrical excellence that after that production we would not make theatrical judgments in exactly the same way” (Rymer 1996). Pamela Payne, writing of its restaging in Sydney two years later praised “the power of the(se) performances, the surprise, vigour and sometimes simple beauty . . . of the physical world of this play, and its trenchant, disconcerting inventiveness” (Payne 1993). Throughout the Gilgul years, Kosky continued to make “laboratory” work with Gilgul and Treason of Images on smaller stages and in site-specific

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contexts, but also created mainstage works for mainstream companies. In Australia in the 1990s, there was limited crossover in audience demographics between the fringe and the mainstream, and conflicting responses to Kosky’s experimental work evidence this gap. By 1997, alongside the Gilgul works, Kosky had “shocked” mainstream audiences with radical stagings of canonical texts such as Nabucco, The Flying Dutchman and Tartuffe, and mainstream audiences and critics were less forgiving of his, and the company’s, undaunted experimentation. A review for The Operated Jew in The Age describes the work as “a series of half-formed and only partially realised ideas”, as the critic laments that “this is . . . surprising given the excellence of previous Gilgul productions such as The Dybbuk and Es Brent” (Ross 1997). Nonetheless, the fringe remained loyal and Suzanne Spunner, writing in the determinedly counter-mainstream RealTime Arts, reflects a position on the other side of this cultural divide when she describes the work as “profoundly live theatre . . . the text taut and the choreography and the music stretched like a tight skin around it” (Spunner 1997).6 Some of the critical and audience responses to the work (in particular to The Exile Trilogy) revealed a palpable anxiety in response to the cultural specificity of the work, particularly its use of Yiddish and Hebrew texts, and of iconography and aspects of ritual derived directly from Jewish culture. These problems are particularly distinct in relation to The Dybbuk, which is sited deep within the culture of the shtetl, the pre-war European Yiddish Theatre, and a peculiarly Jewish netherworld. They pertain in some measure or other, however, to all five Gilgul works. These manifest anxieties regarding the ability to “read” the symbology of the works seemed not to be confined to the non-Jewish audience. Some Jewish audience members unfamiliar with the aspects of Jewish culture referenced in the work appeared to feel obliquely chastised by the work for lack of cultural literacy. Peter Morrison, critic for the Sydney edition of The Australian Jewish News, predicted that the work would confirm antisemitic prejudice, found its form and networks of reference esoteric, and objected to use of the grotesque and the arcane in the embodiment of Jewish characters and Jewish narratives: I simply could not understand many of Kosky’s references; and those I spoke to included well-informed Jews . . . the non-play is heavily loaded with mysticism, Cabbalism, and just plain old Yiddishe superstition; which reminds me that the piece was strongly advertised as not being Ghetto Theatre.7 If Ghetto Theatre means theatre that can largely be appreciated by Jews, I have my doubts. If most Jews who see it don’t know what much of it is about, non-Jews must be completely bemused (Morrison 1993).

It is, perhaps, difficult to divorce the trajectory of critical responses to the Gilgul works from its relation to Kosky’s own trajectory as a public persona, as he became

6 RealTime Arts (1994–2017) promoted itself as “a free national arts magazine, focused on innovation in the arts and countering limited mainstream media attention to a wealth of emerging experimental and hybrid arts practices”. 7 The marketing campaign for the Sydney tour of The Exile Trilogy in 1993 was focussed around the key message “This is not ghetto theatre”.

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increasingly as well known for his combative public utterances on what Alison Croggon describes as “the undeniable provincialism of much of the culture” (Croggon 2010, p. 4) as for his creative output. The challenging nature of the work, as Morrison’s response above indicates, was read by some as emanating from a “desire to shock” in the making of work that was “wilfully obscure”. This accusation has been levelled frequently at Kosky throughout his career in Australia. In his review of the later The Lost Echo, produced in Sydney in 2006, Melbourne critic Chris Boyd describes Kosky’s relationship with Sydney as “uneasy”, but raises the spectre of the Sydney-Melbourne competition for cultural capital in his assertion that “Melbourne has learned to tolerate Kosky’s excesses. Just.” (Boyd 2006). These claims were, and remain, problematic in relation to the Gilgul work and, we would contend, demonstrate a misunderstanding of the aspirations of Kosky and the company, while perhaps confirming his critique of the parochialism of mainstream Australian culture. Firstly, they assume the primacy of audience response as a measure of intrinsic value, while we have attempted to establish the Gilgul context as a laboratory for experimentation. As stated above, our perspective, then and now, is that we were making the sort of theatre that interested us and none of the ensemble members now recall discussions about how it might be received by an audience. A possible exception to this was some concern expressed about whether a Jewish audience might be offended by the co-option or transgression of particular elements of Jewish cultural practice, and the deployment of some measures to address these.8 Secondly, they assume that a desire to “shock” is a bad thing. Michael Kantor, now a seasoned director of similarly bold and hyper-theatrical works of performance, commented in conversation that “the desire to shock is an inherent value of theatre. A core part of theatre is that astonishment is required to get a reaction”. Finally, and despite Kosky’s frequent assertions that Gilgul worked as an ensemble, it demonstrates a misunderstanding of how the work was made by framing it as the output of a single monocratic auteur pursuing his own agenda, rather than as a product of collective creation by a group of artists. We would contend that this view devalues one of Kosky’s key strengths as an artist, which is his capacity to create generative spaces for collective practice.

Context and Influences: Performance Tendencies in the 1990s Richards and Prior contend that: Gilgul’s physical style emerged between the waves of Australian theatre practice, and reflected changes in the way theatre training and realization techniques were appropriated from the international avant-garde. Critic Keith Gallasch cites Gilgul as having established

8

For example, despite evident contraventions of conservative Jewish cultural practice, such as a female actor performing the Kaddish (prayer for the dead), it was company policy not to perform on the Sabbath.

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Y. Prior and M. Delbridge an individual and influential style within the Australian circus and physical theatre renaissance, a movement recognized internationally as making what is probably Australia’s most distinct contribution to contemporary performance (Gallasch 2001, p. 20). Whereas the “New Wave” theatre-makers of the 1970s had drawn on Meyerhold, Artaud, Grotowski, Le Coq, and Brook, recent enthusiasms had veered towards Butoh, Tadashi Suzuki, Anne Bogart, and Phillipe Gaulier. In contrast, Gilgul’s scepticism extended towards orthodox regimes of training; the company was willing to incorporate elements from anything which appeared useful and hence to develop its own distinct stylistic melange. (Richards and Prior 2008, p. 235)

We might add to the artists cited above, the work of the Wooster Group in New York, in their “cutting up, quoting, redistribution, and recontextualization of the world archive of accumulated texts, images, and sounds” (Marranca 2003, p. 1), but also of Pina Bausch, whose dance theatre was first presented in Australia in 1982 and made a deep and lasting impression on the local performance scene. While we may claim that the work produced by the company was so idiosyncratic that it might be described as inimitable, it did not emerge in a vacuum and was influenced by progenitors and peers, both in the Australian and international sphere. What is difficult to determine, particularly at this distance from its period of activity, is what precise influences infused the work and how conscious the makers were of their effects. While its members may or may not have seen the work of these influential practitioners, most of the ensemble had encountered theatre or performance studies at university and been exposed to accounts of contemporary practice in scholarly journals such as TDR: The Drama Review and New Theatre Quarterly. The narratives and identities explored in The Exile Trilogy, of performance and migration in and from Europe (in particular Eastern Europe) in the early to mid-twentieth century, resonated with performance tendencies in the latter half of the century and, while no company members had seen the work in performance, it is difficult to ignore certain aspects of Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class and Wielopole, Wielopole which were reflected in early Gilgul work. This includes the use of a narrative frame in which dead souls return to encounter their younger lives, and a characterisation of the performance space in which “memory is imaged as a room, which means memory is localised within a concrete, material form” (Gluhovic 2013, p. 111). Indeed, the work of both companies was strongly influenced by early productions of The Dybbuk, and Gluhovic cites Kantor’s viewing of the Habima production of the play in Cracow in 1938 as having “made a deep impression on him” (Gluhovic 2013, p. 284). An additional commonality was the onstage presence of the director, given Kosky’s visible presence as pianist/accompanist at the edge of the performance space in each of the Gilgul productions. It is also possible to see Kosky’s work with Gilgul within a lineage of contemporary performance in Australia that both preceded and paralleled its period of activity. Peter Eckersall describes the 1980s in Australia as “the first age of directors running processes, distinctive artistic visions, almost like an auteur kind of thing” (Eckersall et al. 2014, p. 124). In Melbourne, for example, the “dream theatre” of Jenny Kemp and the rich, gestural and deconstructive theatre of Peter King (with whom Prior and Corrigan had also worked) opened new local vistas of theatrical possibility while the Sydney Front

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group’s devised works melding “energetically physical” performance with “a rich diversity of appropriated texts” (Guthrie 1996, p. 279) also share features with Gilgul’s approach to performance composition. As noted in “Theatre of Exile: The Possible and the Improbable in the work of Gilgul Theatre, 1991–1997” (Richards and Prior 2008), Gilgul Theatre emerged in a historico-cultural moment that, as Veronica Kelly has argued, saw the “dissolving of the central theatrical narrative of ‘national identity’” in favour of a more “selective and post-colonial type of post-modernism” (Kelly 1998, p. 8). By 1991, the project to reclaim Australian stages from the colonisation of British and American narratives and genres that drove the vernacular theatre of the “New Wave” in the 1970s had bled towards the margins. Artists were ready to grapple with the complex realities of a nation which had been pressed to acknowledge that it was constituted by and through a multiplicity of cultural, regional, class, and gender identities. Australian theatre artists were responding explicitly to the diversity of the Australian population through investigations of narratives of migration, and contemporary performative transmutations of the languages, accents and traditions of originary cultures. An expanding range of performance practices at the end of the century is canvassed in Veronica Kelly’s 1998 essay collection, Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s and evidences the emergence and substantialisation of work rooted in hitherto marginalised practices, cultures and subcultures—addressing Indigenous performance, Asian-Australian theatre, feminist theatre, queer theatre, “multicultural theatre”, community theatre, and physical theatre. Gilgul appeared at a time when Australian audiences were ready for the ways in which these shifting identities had been represented in the past to be challenged, and for their complexities and intersections to be reflected in the work. In its address to Jewish culture and history, Gilgul aligned with other artists concerned with the recuperation and exploration of traditional performance traditions from migrant cultures, or explorations of the contemporary experience of marginalised national cultures and communities.

Conclusion TOM WRIGHT. I suspect that actually there was almost no direct legacy until Samara emerges twenty years later or something like that.9 Actually, in some ways, the oddness and the absolute idiosyncrasy of Gilgul was reinforced by the fact that by the early 2000s people had almost forgotten it had happened.

As we approached the writing of this chapter, one of our aims was to consider the legacy of Kosky’s work with Gilgul. The broad concept of legacy, however, is complex when considering the work of an artist who is still very much alive and 9

Jewish director, Samara Hersch created two performance works based on the legend of the Dybbuk: A Dybbuk Event, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne 12–14 April 2016, and Dybbuks Theatreworks, Melbourne 14–26 August 2018. A Dybbuk Event directly cited the Gilgul production by incorporating a recreated fragment of the original Gilgul work in which Prior appeared once more wrestling with a “dybbuk” dancer concealed under a wedding gown.

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extremely prolific, and at such a distance from a body of work seen by few. Undoubtedly, the view from Australia is conditioned by Kosky’s apparently permanent move to Europe, effectively bifurcating his career to an Australian (before) and a European (after) period. Kosky is still, however, described as an “Australian director” and, while he has not made a work in Australia since 2008, works created in Europe that have toured to Australia in the last decade have played to full houses and great acclaim. Indeed, in March 2020, Kosky was awarded one of Australia’s most prestigious arts prizes, the 2019 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for his remarkable and influential presence in the Australian arts sector. If we accept Charlotte Farrell’s claim that Kosky’s work in Australia has had “lasting impact” (Farrell 2017, p. 31), where might we locate his work with Gilgul in relation to this impact, given that the work left few tangible traces?10 We have established that the work established a distinctive voice within a broader cultural project as Australian artists contended with a historical period of cultural transition and some cultural anxiety. Its address to the Jewish-Australian experience could be viewed in this context as playing a part in redefining a more sophisticated sense of Australian culture and nationhood and/or manifesting, as Rustom Bharucha stated of the intercultural project in performance, a zeitgeist of “fascination for ‘other’ cultures . . . born out of a certain ennui, a reaction to aridity and the subsequent search for new sources of energy, vitality and sensuality” (Bharucha 1996, p. 207). Richards and Prior contend that the mystery and exoticism of the work, and its refusal to explicate its textual and cultural sources, divided audiences in a “cultural moment when issues of multiculturalism, the integrity of cultural traditions, and the degree to which ‘other’ traditions could be articulated in relation to the dominant culture, were beginning to be debated” (Richards and Prior, 2008, p. 237). Thirty years later, these debates are still very much alive. In its stage language it drew, consciously or otherwise, on emerging post-modern and post-dramatic strategies to produce theatre created out of a range of sources. These sources were borrowed and transmuted through dense textual and narrative interweavings and collisions, through performers’ bodies pushed to the brink of endurance, through intrepid encounters with the architecture and features of grungy (or grunged-up) spaces and punishing stage machinery, and in rich musical and textual scores. In these respects, the work can be seen as part of a lineage of audacious and idiosyncratic theatre works with its roots in (largely) European experimental art theatre but projecting towards Kosky’s later work, and the work of other Australian auteur directors such as Benedict Andrews, Samara Hersch, Adena Jacobs and Simon Stone.

10

Documentation of Gilgul work remains sparse and fragmented, limited to production images, some poor video documentation of The Exile Trilogy recorded during its Sydney season, Melissa Rymer’s documentary which incorporates footage of both The Exile Trilogy and The Wilderness Room, critical reviews and some scholarly attention in the writings of Richards and Prior (2002, 2008), Meyrick (2000), and Farrell (2017).

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TOM WRIGHT. One of its great strengths was just how un-Australian it was. It always felt like it belonged very much to Gilgul and specifically Barrie and his collaborative energy. And so actually one of the best things about it was the way it didn’t spawn imitators and it felt fully its own.

More easily identified is the impact that working with Kosky in the Gilgul Ensemble has had on its alumni, whose practice was advanced or expanded as a result of their collaboration with Kosky and with each other. All have gone on to make their own impact on the Australian cultural landscape. Matthew Delbridge is Professor of Performance Studies at Deakin University, continues to collaborate on performance projects with Split Britches and to develop practice and research in areas of Motion Capture and digital performance in Australia and internationally. Louise Fox works as a film-maker, producer and writer for stage and screen in Australia, the UK and the US. Elisa Gray has maintained the strongest links with local Jewish culture, in Yiddish theatre and language education, and continues to work as a performer and teacher. Michael Kantor is a theatre director and producer of similarly bold vision and was Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre from 2005 to 2010. Yoni Prior maintains industry connections as a researcher, dramaturg, performer and board member of cultural organizations, and was Head of Drama at Deakin University between 1997 and 2017. Tom Wright is a prolific writer for theatre, a seasoned dramaturg and took up the role of Artistic Associate at Belvoir Street Theatre in 2016 after a decade as Associate Director at the Sydney Theatre Company. In retrospect, we did some really good stuff and some absolute tosh. But Barrie’s intellectual discipline and rigour have been such positive forces for me. A five-minute conversation with him is like a six-week trip overseas, in terms of recharging the batteries. He makes you believe again. (Tom Wright, quoted in Sian Prior 2003)

For these artists, as for Kosky, the Gilgul years offered what Kantor describes as “a pure space for Barrie and for us all”. The move to create his own company sprang from a desire to escape the limitations imposed on a “director for hire”, beholden to the companies and institutions that employed him. Gilgul provided Kosky space and time in which he could explore an authentic personal voice, and the distinctive work he made with the company contributed to a developing reputation that allowed him to dictate his own terms in his work outside the company. Tom Wright describes this as “a process of him finding out what he could and couldn’t do”. Louise Fox points to Gilgul as evidence of Kosky’s capacity to locate and create these “laboratory” spaces in Australia in the 1990s for the development of his unique directorial vision. LOUISE FOX. I guess Gilgul was the laboratory for the rest of Barrie’s theatre work . . . I feel like he had these little laboratories going all over the place for himself. A NIDA laboratory and a Gilgul laboratory and a main stage laboratory and an opera laboratory. And ultimately, they all inform each other.11

11

The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney is Australia’s longest-established training institution for actors, directors, designers and stage managers.

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Fig. 2.13 The Dybbuk. 1991 Image: Still from documentary film Kosky in Paradise

ROBERT LEHRER. So, when you get those things coming together, everything comes together. The cast, the piece, the acting, the music, the lighting, the set, it all came together. Pretty fortunate that it happened, and I think for whatever reason you have those places in time, this place in time where it all works (Fig. 2.13).

References Anski, S. (1979). In J. C. Landis (Ed.), The Dybbuk. In The Dybbuk and other great Yiddish Plays, ed. and trans. New York: Random House. Bharucha, R. (1996). Somebody’s other: Disorientations in the cultural politics of our times. In P. Pavis (Ed.), The intercultural performance reader (pp. 196–212). London: Routledge. Boyd, C. (2006). Sydney Theatre Company: The Lost Echo by Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright. Review. The Morning After: Performing Arts in Australia. 9 September. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from http://chrisboyd.blogspot.com/2006/09/sydney-theatre-company-lost-echo-by. html. Croggon, A. (2010). Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky: Two innovative Australian directors. Theatre Forum, 37, 3–20. Eckersall, P., Chaundy, S., Cornelius, P., et al. (2014). Round table on theatre in Melbourne in the 1980s. Australasian Drama Studies, 64, 109–132. Farrell, C. (2017). Barrie Kosky’s Theatre of Post-Tragic Affects. PhD thesis. University of New South Wales. Gallasch, K. (2001). In repertoire: A select guide to Australian contemporary performance. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Australia Council. Gilgul Theatre. (1991). The Dybbuk. Theatre Programme. Gilman, S. (1991). The Jew’s Body. London: Routledge. Gluhovic, M. (2013). Performing European memories: Trauma, ethics, politics. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Guthrie, A. J. (1996). When the Way Out was In: Avant Garde Theatre in Australia 1965–1985. PhD Thesis. University of Wollongong. Kelly, V. (1998). Old patterns, new energies. In V. Kelly (Ed.), Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (pp. 1–19). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lehman, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon: Routledge. Levi, J. S., & Bergman, G. F. J. (1974). Australian Genesis: Jewish convicts and settlers 1788–1850. Adelaide: Rigby. Marranca, B. (2003). The Wooster Group: A dictionary of ideas. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 25(2), 1–18. Meyrick, J. (2000). Filthy spaces: the investment of non-theatre venues in Melbourne 1990–1995. In P. Tait (Ed.), Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of live performance (pp. 154–176). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Morrison, P. (1993). Review of The Dybbuk. The Australian Jewish News. Sydney edition, November 12. Panizza, O. (1991). The operated Jew: Two tales of anti-semitism. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge. Payne, P. (1993). Stark shades of Jewish times. The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 November. Prior, Y. (1998). Acting Jewish. a case study of performance-making practice. MA thesis. Monash University. Prior, S. (2003). Forget polite drama, let’s stretch the imagination. The Age, 2 December. Richards, A., & Prior, Y. (2002). Into the wilderness: Gilgul’s “physical” theatre 1994. Australasian Drama Studies, 41, 28–49. Richards, A., & Prior, Y. (2008). Theatre of exile: the possible and the improbable in the work of the Gilgul Theatre, 1991–1997. In A. Belkin (Ed.), Jewish theatre: tradition in transition and intercultural vistas (pp. 229–242). Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Arts. Rosenfeld, L. (1977). Bright star of exile. Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theatre. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. Ross, D. (1997). Operation proves unsuccessful. The Age, 26 September. Rymer, M. (dir.). (1996). Kosky in Paradise. Australian Film Finance Corporation & Weis Films Pty. Ltd. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼deiE09BDcE4. Spunner, S. (1997). Have we got Jews for you. Real Time Arts, 21, October–November. Wiesel, E. (1979). The Trial of God (As It Was Held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod). Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Schocken Books.

Yoni Prior has worked as a performer, deviser, director, dramaturg, translator and writer with theatre and dance companies in Australia, Israel and Europe and was a member of the Gilgul Ensemble. Course Director of Drama at Deakin University from 1997–2019, she is now a Senior Fellow in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She is the current editor of the journal Australasian Drama Studies. Matt Delbridge is Professor of Performance Studies at Deakin University and stage managed the Melbourne seasons of all Gilgul Productions. He regularly collaborates with performance ensemble Split Britches and delivers masterclasses in Motion Capture and Digital Performance environments in Scandinavia, Europe and Asia. Matt is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University, Hong Kong.

Chapter 3

“Aesthetic Ideas”: Mystery and Meaning in the Early Work of Barrie Kosky Jennifer A. McMahon

Abstract In this chapter I invite the reader to consider the philosophical assumptions which underpin the early career aims and objectives of Barrie Kosky. A focus will be his “language” of opera, and the processes by which the audience is prompted to interpret it. The result will be to see how Kosky creates mystery and meaning while avoiding fantasy and escapism; and can express psychological truth while stimulating subjective interpretations. The point will be to show that Kosky’s oeuvre demonstrates a central concept in the Kantian tradition of aesthetic theory regarding the key process in creative expression, and that is the evocation/communication of “aesthetic ideas”.

Introduction: Narrative and Spectacle Barrie Kosky’s early operas were sometimes referred to as concept-operas.1 In some respects, this appellation reflected the difficulty many had in categorizing Kosky’s early work, such was the assault on expectations that his work often wrought. In the many interviews he gave during this early period he explained that he wanted the audience to be active participants in the intellectual and emotional sense, not in just the reactive sense. He hoped the audience would be engaged in making sense of the combination of imagery, performances and orchestration and in turn experiencing the music intensely and vividly. Here is an excerpt from an interview he gave in 1990, when he referred to the negative responses he sometimes stimulated in his audiences:

1 Roger Howell, who played Figaro in Kosky’s (1990) opera production of The Barber of Seville for the Victorian State Opera, refers to Kosky’s work as what he and others have called a conceptproduction. This is where images and symbols drive the action rather than the conventional narrative. See Prain (1990).

J. A. McMahon (*) The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_3

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J. A. McMahon But unless you get mixed reviews, something is very wrong. I’m not so insecure that I want everyone to like my work. And I’m not interested in creating theatre that isn’t in some way provocative. The theatre must be about diversity. People say they can look at a great painting any number of times and not understand it; they can listen over and over again to a piece of music and not understand that; they can read and re-read a book and always discover something new. But when they go to the theatre, most people come out expecting to have understood it, absolutely. I don’t believe it’s the director’s job to tell a story as simply as possible. My aim is to tell it as ambiguously as possible; and as interestingly—to re-interpret it (Payne 1990).

Many operas become so entrenched in conventions that have grown up around them that they become a kind of museum piece, to be enjoyed from an emotional distance. It is as if the music is an accompaniment to a story. But of course, most operas are structured through narrative and it is not that Kosky ignores storytelling. Rather, Kosky reveals unexpected aspects of each story, with the idea of intensifying the audience’s engagement with the music. He reimagines the opera to evoke associations and connotations which are as fresh and relevant now as the original staging of the opera might have been when the opera was debuted. He injects the work with references and symbolism that excite connotations and imaginaries that occasion a heightened experience of the music. He often disrupts the flow of the narrative to this end. But Kosky also dislikes spectacle for spectacle’s sake. He told one interviewer: I have a deep loathing of opera as spectacle. . . . It is better to see ten different interpretations of Wagner than to see a historical production without gimmicks which simply preserves a cliché-ridden conception. I find it repulsive that a production like that can be praised (Craven 1990a).

“Spectacle” for Kosky pertains to the cliché-ridden rather than the overblown emotive. No production aims to be cliched but when a method or style becomes entrenched over time, what once may have been an exciting and evocative work can become a kind of sign of the past; reassuring and consoling perhaps, but not what Kosky has in mind for opera. What I refer to as a museum piece is in part what Kosky dislikes about spectacle. It keeps the audience at a safe distance. Kosky strives to evoke an emotive response in his audience (Kosky 1989b) but the kind of emotive response that he has in mind is based on intellectual challenge. As he writes in 1989: I am not asking for opera audiences in Australia to stand up and scream insults at the performance (as I witnessed in Dusseldorf) but if opera is to survive as a provocative, illuminating artform then it must be presented as challengingly and as seriously as possible. This means, for a start at least, that audiences are no longer treated as impotent imbeciles, but as a collection of people with an infinite variety of responses and opinions, whether the work is by Mozart, Berg, Wagner or Puccini (Kosky 1989b).

Another interview extracted this slight equivocation on spectacle from Kosky: Part of me is pure show biz. [However] I loathe spectacle for spectacle’s sake, but I concede that there are certain sorts of opera that I would like to be given a huge budget for. But basically I think that opera should be an experience rather than a spectacle. That aside, I would like to do opera with huge choruses because audiences like really large groups on stage (Balodis 1990).

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Kosky continued to explain the avoidance of spectacle as part of his aesthetic after he left Australia (Swed 2013). He also continues to critique the staging of contemporary opera generally as placing too much emphasis on design and the merely decorative (Christiansen 2016). He believes the music and close attention to the text should be the main inspiration in staging and performance. But, according to Kosky, “the more formalised and ritualised it is, the more fascinating it becomes. Opera is truthful, but it’s not real” (Christiansen 2016). The truth to which Kosky refers when he discusses music and opera is a kind of freshly harvested emotion; for Kosky this is what distinguishes his work from spectacle or mindless confections. It is as if he associates pain and offended sensibilities with some kind of advance in our ability to feel. And this advance is for him associated with an increased humanity. Kosky wants to bring people into and along with him in his love for the medium. But for the audience, this involves engaging in some heavy lifting. He often discusses his view that a performance must bring the audience to new intellectual or emotional territory for it to be worth the effort. For example, he says that opera “should be a quasi-mystical theatrical experience. The different elements of exultation and even frustration, should combine to remove the audience from conventional assumptions” (Craven 1990b).2 Now the difficulty as I see it is in the tension between his aim to engage the audience in a critically minded attention and his desire for leaving room for a broad spectrum of interpretation, and in his words “a quasi-mystical theatrical experience”. Think of Bertolt Brecht’s plays as an example of the former. Brechtian theatre engages a chorus-like element which involves a commentary on proceedings so that the audience is kept from being caught up in identifying with the plight of the characters and is instead kept in states of critical awareness. But this is only part of the objective for Kosky. While Kosky hates opera which flatters expectations or lulls the audience into a comfortable complacency, he does like to think his audience is open to interpreting his work as they choose.3 So on the one hand he wants to take the audience out of their comfort zone, while on the other he aims to leave the work open to interpretation. But this sets up what may appear to be two contradictory aims. To take an audience out of their comfort zone requires taking them to some specific place by expressing quite determinate propositions. On the other hand, leaving the work open to interpretation risks the kind of complacency or wish fulfilment Kosky so aims to avoid. Kosky’s challenge to audiences goes beyond frustrating their expectations regarding traditional staging practices, even though this in itself, when adhering more closely to the original text/score, can prompt new

2

Craven quotes from his interview with Kosky in which they discussed Kosky’s upcoming treatment of Malcolm Williamson’s The Growing Castle (a musical version of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play). 3 In an interview (O’Neill 1989) Kosky explains that “opera ought to do more than produce the effect of warm bolognaise sauce poured down the fronts of the audience”.

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interpretations of the originals.4 Kosky’s interest in a particular work is its potential to jolt and provoke discontinuities in our habits of belief not for its own sake but in service to a more intense experience of the music. But the tension I want to draw out is between this challenge to the audience and the quasi-mystical experience for which he aims. It is not immediately obvious how both can be achieved in the same work, given that Kosky’s explicit operatic objectives are to promote the experience of mystery while at the same time prompting an exploration of the opera’s psychological reality. In more recent interviews, Kosky addresses this apparent contradiction more explicitly. He explains that opera is about reality but without being realistic (Operavision 2019). By this he means that the audience can experience something new through opera but not from learning new facts, or presumably not through rational deliberation, as this would lock an interpretation in. This is perhaps part of his reason for avoiding a reliance on the traditional treatment of narrative, aiming instead to excite the imagination through provocative imagery. Discussing his 1989 production of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden5 for example, he says: It’s provocative. You may not agree with everything he [Tippett] says [through the action depicted in the opera] but it will raise questions . . . It shows that opera as a non-realistic form can be interesting and exciting (Connors 1989).

It is not a determinate message that he is after, but he seeks to challenge perceptions nonetheless. The question remains though how he reconciles this aim with his love of mystery and multiple subjective interpretations. The answer to this question will involve a consideration of the visual language he has developed to achieve his expressive aims. But first, it is helpful to look at the early stirrings of Kosky’s forceful aesthetic.

Kosky’s Early Aesthetic It is intriguing to meet the Opera Director as a youngster in his autobiographical essay On Ecstasy. He madly and passionately conducts Mahler for the imaginary orchestra in his bedroom and describes the transformative power of music on his young self. As a sixteen-year-old, Kosky visited New York with his family where they saw Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Kosky conjures up the image of Bernstein so enraptured by the music that the malevolent spirit of Mahler’s music enters his body and emerges in the expressive intensity of the moment (a foreshadowing of a

4

Thanks to the editor John Severn for pointing this out and for other helpful suggestions here. Directed by Kosky for the Melbourne Spoleto Festival in 1989 when he was twenty-two years old, at The Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, from September 14–30. 5

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Fig. 3.1 Slide, colour transparency of performer in Exile Trilogy—The Dybbuk, by Gilgul Theatre Company in association with Belvoir St Theatre Company B, at Eveleigh Railway Yards, 1993. Depicts performer Yoni Prior standing in the spotlight with fists raised and wearing a long gown. Photographed by John Gollings. ©John Gollings. Photograph from the Peter Corrigan archives, courtesy Imogen Ross and Kristen Anderson, 2010 who gifted the images to the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

moment he captures in a very different context in his own production of The Dybbuk.6 (Fig. 3.1) Kosky explains that he had never seen so much sweat fly off a human body. This was a struggle in which Bernstein was engaged, according to Kosky, between torment and joy, between conflict and passion. Kosky writes that Mahler’s personality had found a “breathing, sweating counterpart in Bernstein’s muscles, bones and flesh” (Kosky 2020, p. 39). Kosky includes in his recounting of the experience, the following questions: “Did music really have the power to do this to a human body? What was being released within this man’s body? And who or what was providing the impetus for all of this unbridled ecstasy?” (Kosky 2020, p. 39) Kosky explains that he was deeply impressed by the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement in Mahler’s aesthetic (Kosky 2020, pp. 35–36). This juxtaposing of polarized emotions endures in Kosky but when he aims for light amusement, he laces it with erotic sensualism, sometimes overt, at other times understated. In On Ecstasy, Kosky describes his grandmother’s chicken soup as a rich goldencoloured glow emanating from the kitchen, conjuring a glorious memory of familial love and warmth. From his descriptions also emerges an image of the child Kosky 6 Kosky directed The Dybbuk in Melbourne in 1991 for the Gilgul Company (a Jewish theatre company he established in Melbourne in 1990).

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rolling around luxuriating in the sensuousness of silk and fur as he buried himself in these fabrics at his grandfather’s textile warehouse. Also, a passion for HR Pufnstuf is revealed which introduces us to the fantastical side of Kosky. This children’s programme of the 1970s featured puppets with hugely over-sized (papier-mâché) heads, objects which talked, a dragon as Mayor, a wicked witch with a “Vroom Broom” and a young male protagonist called Jimmy. The programme is a madly whimsical and brilliantly imaginative romp with amusing references to early Hollywood film stars. There is a spirit of fun and parody in the programme which, along with the other memories recounted in the essay, it is tempting to see resonating through Kosky’s aesthetic. For example, the warm glow which silhouettes his chapters in operas like Eugene Onegin (2019), the silk and fur costumes of his Bell Shakespeare production of King Lear (1998) and the huge puppet heads that often appear in his productions come to mind. To understand Kosky’s oeuvre is to get Kosky the person. But while the coherence and longevity of his work might sway us to the thought that whatever he is feeling might be worth feeling ourselves, it just may be that the work utilizes images and symbols that are just too private or culturally specific to achieve the same level of intensity in everyone, and hence the reality of emotion to which he aspires. Repeatedly in interview and discussion Kosky refers to the role of imagery in opera to engage contemporary sensibilities. The music must be heard as music in the present, not as an accompaniment to a museum piece. There are many reviewers of his early work who praise his imagery in this vein: “Image-making was bold” they say, or they refer to “vivid image-making” (Radic 1991). Another critic writes: at his best [he] can create images with all the potency of a shared religious rite: opera becomes a fully sensuous theatrical experience, connecting to deep symbols which express an ineradicable and mysterious part of our humanity. The jarring juxtapositions, when they work, create what Artaud calls “temptations, in-draughts of air around these ideas” which pit the audience in that “state of deepened and keener perception” which lies at the heart of true theatre (Croggon 1990, p. 152).

Drawing ideas from deeply felt experience is exactly what successful creatives do but if one is to be understood, those experiences cannot be overly personal or idiosyncratic. Kosky explains his creative motivation like this: I do my productions primarily because I want to investigate certain things lying around in my mind. No, I wouldn’t describe this as self-indulgence. If you don’t do something because you want to do it yourself, there’s something wrong. The next level is that people also want to experience it. I can’t please everybody. I’m not after popularity. I won’t do productions that are manipulative, worrying if the audience will like or understand them. . . . The notion that theatre should be real is ridiculous. It should be in a dream state, in the world of the imagination, dealing with the fantastical, the unexplained and the inexplicable (Tarrant 1993).7

7 Kosky was discussing his upcoming production of The Golem, which was opening in Sydney (1993). In the interview the dominant themes were realism and imagination.

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Fig. 3.2 Colour transparency slide of Deborah Mailman as Cordelia, John Bell as King Lear and Melita Jurisic as Goneril in King Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky, Bell Shakespeare Company, 1998. Photograph by Jeff Busby. The Canberra Theatre Centre, 21 August 1998. © Jeff Busby Image provided and owned by Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Kosky’s work is highly subjective in character. Highly subjective images can be very entertaining, and they can reveal much about the character and personality of the creator. If there is a certain cohesion to them, they can speak to the authenticity of the creator and his vision. However, when the images are experienced by the audience as subjective relative to the creator, the audience remain spectators. They are not invited into the work through shared experience, but instead, are given a keyhole through which to spy on the creator. Once the novelty wears off, the audience’s attention wanes. In Kosky’s case, however, his dug-in subjectivity which dismantles monolithic cultural icons, contributes another fragment to the array of splintered values and volatile attitudes that dominate the contemporary global conversation. In this he adroitly captures the current taste for perspectivalism. And yet, as mentioned earlier, for Kosky the essence of opera is mystery (Croggon 1989). What might he have meant by this in the above terms? Consider here a few of the responses Kosky has given during his early career to questions concerning the meaning of his works. Kosky directed King Lear in 1987 for Treason of Images, a theatre company he set up at the University of Melbourne. Kosky played the role of King Lear while directing the production. He was also the designer and played the piano for the production. Kosky directed another production of King Lear for the Bell Shakespeare Company and Queensland Theatre Company in 1998. (Fig. 3.2) Discussing his 1987 production of King Lear, Kosky was quoted

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as saying that he never shies away from the horror of the events in his depiction of them but that he nonetheless avoids nihilism: “inward despair is wrenched around to reveal the possibility of hope and redemption” (Romney 1987).8 And some idea of the sources of Kosky’s varied mix of inspirations is suggested when, according to the reviewer Jason Romney, “stylistically, Kosky says the play [King Lear] combines the aesthetics of the evil empire in Star Wars with a dash of Nazism and the eery poetic resonance of William Blake” (Romney 1987). This gives a good idea of the way the form of Kosky’s aesthetic is comprised of contrasts, as discussed earlier when noting the influence of Mahler. For example, discussing La Calisto in 1987, Kosky says, “we wrench the audience into a one-off cosmic experience . . . this very funny, frivolous and luxurious dabble with the gods, with all its ethereal splendour, is violently pared back. We want to leave audiences with a very strong sense of the tragic human dimension” (University of Melbourne 2021b). “La Calisto is said to combine the sweeping cosmic scope of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the steamy sexuality of a Fellini flick” (University of Melbourne 2021b). Kosky explains that he has “some sort of communicative abilities and imagination to get what’s in (my head) onto the stage, and I enjoy doing it” (Carey 1989). But to appreciate any example of Kosky’s work is in large part to understand the ways in which he breaks with traditions and this requires a familiarity with his oeuvre, even though he wants each audience member to arrive at their own subjective interpretation (Carey 1989). The demands placed upon the audience by groundbreaking work are always greater. Consider this transnational list of images that Kosky provides in the program notes for his production of S. Anski’s The Dybbuk: Ezekiel’s vision of the fiery, celestial chariot; the tabernacle in wilderness, the costume trunks of the Vilna Theatre Troupe on tour in Germany, the cemetery in Krakow, the trains and railway platforms of the diaspora, the Kosher butchers’ shop in the Lower East side, the stage of the Elyseum Theatre Warsaw, the potatoes of the ghetto kitchens, the dressing room of the old Yiddish theatre in North Carlton [Melbourne Australia], the fans gathered outside the backstage doors, the closed gates at Ellis Island, the cut-out cardboard scenery waiting in the wings, the entrance for Warsaw Centrolna Station, the colour of the sky at night in Poland, a Marx Brothers film, the ritual of marriage, burial, exorcism and kosher slaughtering, the Bundist Utopia, the nostalgic television documentary, the road to hell, the shop window of the tailor in Balaclava Road [Caulfield, Melbourne], the road out of purgatory, the shattered shop window of the tailor in the Ring Strasse, the Kabbalistic road to beauty and wisdom, the faded foyer photographs, the reconstructed film print, the Zionist Utopia, the empty orchestra pit, the garish makeup of performance and memory. Shifting, blurred unfocused (Kosky 1991). (Fig. 3.3)

And for his production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, he includes the following sources of inspiration: “1920s Spanish carnival paintings of Joan Miro with the constricting social fabric of Beaumarchais’ eighteenth-century play and the

8 Kosky directed King Lear in 1987 for Treason of Images, a theatre company he set up at the University of Melbourne. Kosky played the role of King Lear while directing the production. He was also the designer and played the piano for the production. Kosky directed another production of King Lear for the Bell Shakespeare Company and Queensland Theatre Company in 1998.

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Fig. 3.3 Slide, colour transparency of performance of Exile Trilogy—The Dybbuk, by Gilgul Theatre Company in association with Belvoir St Theatre Company B, at Town Hall Motors, St Kilda, Melbourne, 1993. Depicts the exterior of a building with four performers lined up on a stage in front of it. The performers are Tom Wright, Yoni Prior, Michael Kantor and Elisa Gray. Set and costume design by Peter Corrigan. Photographed by John Gollings. ©John Gollings. Photograph from the Peter Corrigan archives, courtesy Imogen Ross and Kristen Anderson, 2010 who gifted the images to the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

spatial energy of Russian constructivism with the unnerving burlesque of Pee Wee Herman” (Kosky 1990). The impetus for Kosky’s choice of symbols might be too private at times, even though the way he celebrates an unashamed subjectivity in his approach is attractive. He can talk of the importance of mystery in opera but he also needs to reconcile this with his objective to communicate with his audience. The question remains, how does he achieve this? Extreme opposing emotions and conflicted states of mind are the broader themes which have always occupied Kosky’s creative endeavors. Early in his career, he directed Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays and Don Giovanni on alternative nights over a few weeks on the fringe of the 1988 Melbourne Spoleto Festival. Kosky explained that “the two works are . . . linked by quasi-mythological protagonists and through the themes of obsession, sexuality, power and hypocrisy”. This “psychological” production according to Kosky, treated Lulu as a “20th century female equivalent of Don Giovanni”, “male and female version of the same sexual myth” (University of Melbourne 2021a). The tension between conflicting emotions and the struggle between contradictory impulses are explored again and again throughout Kosky’s direction of operas and

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theatre. For this reason, it is not surprising that Kosky would choose Tippett’s opera The Knot Garden for his directorial debut in the main program of the Melbourne Spoleto Festival in 1989.9 The libretto for the opera is structured around the Jungian theme of transformation, which emerges when opposites within a psyche are given expression. According to Kosky, The Knot Garden involves “an intense exploration of love and hate” (Carey 1989). One of Tippett’s stated influences is the work of Virginia Woolf. For example, Isla, a character in Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts, says there are only two emotions, love and hate—and according to Kosky, Tippett was significantly influenced by this particular novel when composing this opera (Kosky 1989a). Tippett explained to interviewers previously that he favoured opera over other forms because one can use the kind of symbols and gestures in opera through which to explore universal themes. He defined opera in terms of four rules. The most relevant for this discussion was his second rule which Kosky particularly noted: “The more collective an artistic experience is going to be, the more the discovery of suitable material is involuntary” (Kosky 1989a). I am reminded of the explanation of the creative process given by the romantic poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. He thought that the creative writer was the person who could draw from deep within their own psyche, so to speak, to access the core of their own individuality, but by doing so the material would become more universal rather than less so. The idea is that if one draws upon the most deeply affecting aspects of one’s themes and images, the more one is drawn away from the overly personal and idiosyncratic, and so more likely to express something relevant and accessible to others. Emerson (1883, p. 329) writes: “Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the human race”.10 The notion of genius held by writers like Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and philosophers like Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, to name just a few, always pertained to the individual who was able to express the universal perspective. The idea of a misunderstood genius was an oxymoron. In effect, an individual who could not make themselves understood demonstrated in that failure their lack of genius. Today we expect our creatives to communicate with us but the contemporary taste for splintered perspectives and reversal of fortunes where minority experiences are elevated above the established codes is something that makes these earlier notions of genius seem rather dated. Beauty and truth were once considered timeless in both western and non-western epistemologies and aesthetics but we see now that in practice this supposed timelessness simply pointed to a shared set of values and attitudes, and pressure on those with different values and attitudes to conform to a

9 This was also the first opera to feature a homosexual couple (and an inter-racial one at that). Thanks to the editor John Severn for pointing this out. 10 For a discussion of this in more contemporary terms see McMahon (2014), pp. 152–56.

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mainstream aesthetic.11 Kosky treats The Knot Garden as a springboard for various interpretations. As one reviewer wrote of Kosky’s interpretation, “the opera is intensely subjective, probing into the dynamic of the unconscious. . . . music theatre seems to be the best way to explore the paring away of social convention that expressionist art seeks to achieve” (Jones, 1989). Yet there is a certain universalism in the form that Kosky uses again and again: a form of contrasts. Kosky is not expecting the audience to share his views. He is not looking for the gigantic hand of the human race. He is communicating instead what he feels, which includes both passion and grit; for us it is like conversing with the devil’s advocate. But is a language of contrasts enough? Without relying on the classical tropes and interpretations at his disposal, what drives the audience to make sense of his work? Before suggesting a different way of thinking about this tension between mystery and meaning in terms of a philosophical concept known as “aesthetic ideas”, I want to push this point further so as to draw out the significance of what Kosky achieves.

Aesthetic Contrasts as a Language of Opera To recognise the significance of certain images, characters or themes in a production, requires not only the relevant cultural knowledge but a willingness to imagine it and understand it as the director intends. The detail that Kosky often provided in the programme notes attests to his assumption that the audience, to some degree at least, attempts to connect with the meaning behind the director’s choices. But Kosky’s intention as we have seen is for an opera to engage us as a contemporary artwork rather than a museum piece, and so to work its magic upon us in virtue of its artistic aspects. And for this to happen in an engaging way rather than from a distance (as spectacle) requires a shared language which in turn presupposes considerable experience with the medium. We might say that there exists an array of smaller sub-cultural artistic languages, rather than a monolithic shared artistic language. Within each there might be expressed many perspectives, and many interests. Where, once, one might have been required to learn the values, attitudes, aesthetics and epistemologies of a dominant established perspective, now one might feel one only needs to find a sympathetic group for one’s own self-expression—whether anyone understands it, is beside the point. As long as someone likes it, you are on the map. Expression and spectacle might be the new beauty and truth. The upshot is, if the traditional modes of communicating operatic works are set aside, and the aim is to avoid replacing them with an equally monolithic vision, then one might opt for an expressionist theatre of private experiences, Emerson’s views to the contrary notwithstanding. As an analogy, consider the paintings of Die Brücke

For non-Western aesthetics, see entries for “Arab aesthetics”, “Japanese aesthetics”, “Indian aesthetics” etc. in Kelly (ed) (2014).

11

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Fig. 3.4 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self Portrait as Soldier, 1915. Oil on canvas, 27.2
24 in (69.2
60.9 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Charles F. Olney Fund, 1950. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

(The Bridge), an expressionist group of painters founded in Dresden in 1905. This is one of many German expressionist groups which emerged around this time and went on to have a profound influence on the course of subsequent Western art. Their aim was to bridge the gap between the staid conventions of the dominant artforms of the day and truly raw emotion. To this end they adopted what they considered pre-academic forms of expression. They developed what they thought were primitive modes of painting as though there was a way of depicting experience that evoked feelings irrespective of the spectator’s own background knowledge and experience. The works all had a representational element, and, it must be said, paid considerable attention to pictorial values like composition and form, though in the context at the time, they would have been seen as very roughly hewn forms with non-representational use of colour. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the artists involved. (Fig. 3.4) It is difficult for us now to see the works the way they would have struck people at the time. In their original context the records show they were perceived by the general public as quite shocking and untutored. Yet for those in the know concerning the objectives of the group, the works were exciting and fresh. Now, since many of us in the West have grown up looking at expressionist works or those influenced by the German Expressionist style, the original works look quite traditional. But the point I want to make here is that at the time of their creation these works would never have revealed their narratives or emotional tenor to those without the relevant experience and knowledge. When we look at these works now, a trained

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eye recognizes tightly structured compositions perhaps, but otherwise their themes and their treatment are mainly of interest within an art historical context (as museum pieces). Baldly speaking, their colour use hardly delivers an experience of any note or confidence in the work’s communicative capacity. For expressionist art to work as expression requires as much an entry into the conventions surrounding the art form and style as any more academic work. Art requires a shared language of form and style that one must learn. Even when the aim is to look past this language, the success of such endeavours usually relies on an understanding of what is meant to be “looked past”. The perceptual elements are not meaningful or significant until they are given their particular cultural context including the relevant artistic conventions, to be adopted or looked past. The point to consider here is the difference between universally recognized forms as opposed to the conventional. Let’s consider another example, this time the expressive intentions of the twentieth-century American artist Jackson Pollock who painted in a style characterised by the art critic Clement Greenberg (1961) as Abstract Expressionism. Taking his lead from the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Pollock aimed to uncover a universal visual language that held no cultural barriers. Kandinsky had studied folk art and believed that his heartfelt response to the naïve colour palettes and roughly articulated representations came from a universal substratum of his psyche (he was influenced by various cultish movements of the time but we need not visit that here). In any case Kandinsky developed an abstract language of form and movement alternating across gestural and hard-edge designs and intensely varied and contrasting palettes. Pollock in his attempt at a universal visual language adopted a gestural approach, layering various coloured skeins of paint across, and seemingly into, the flat canvas. Pollock thought he had discovered a language of art that was somehow primordial in its expressive capacity. Intriguingly, a professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, Richard Taylor, decided to investigate whether there was any merit to Pollock’s claims (Taylor et al. 2000). He and his team travelled to Pollock’s studio some years after the artist’s death. Pollock’s studio had been kept intact by his widow, the artist Lee Krasner. Taylor’s strategy was to see whether there was evidence in Pollock’s paintings of non-incidental fractal patterns which would show that the artist controlled the pouring of paint to achieve a subliminal patterning. As a control for his experiment, he began by measuring the patterns on the floor of the studio, assuming they were incidental. He compared these measurements to the patterns in Pollock’s paintings. He found, as he had hoped, that the studio floor did not represent fractal patterns but rather just incidental splashes of paint; however, the paintings did exhibit a high ratio of fractal patterning. (Fig. 3.5) He noted that the high ratio of the patterns was the kind you see in overlapping tree branches rather than in clouds, which exhibit a lower ratio. (Fig. 3.6) In any case, he found a significant amount of control in the works and a form of patterning, which by definition is a universally detectable aspect, even though the basis of our response to the works can be unconscious or subliminal.

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Fig. 3.5 Studio floor used by Jackson Pollock at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, New York. By Rhododendrites—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid¼44204608

Fig. 3.6 Overlapping branches showing high density fractal patterns. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Art Anderson. By Art Anderson, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid¼52771127

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Most people, Taylor pointed out, enjoy the lower ratio of patterns found in clouds; the Pollock paintings in contrast, were much more intense. On the other hand, the marks made by Pollock traced the arc made by an outstretched arm and the regularity of its movements, closer to the movements of the limbs of trees than anything about clouds.12 In either case though, the point for us is that the form of Pollock’s work did utilise universal principles. However, whether their particular manifestation was given significance and what meaning was ascribed to them would be entirely culturally dependent, and conveyed by way of convention. For example, without the influential art theorist and critic Greenberg’s promotion of Pollock’s work, it is probably unlikely Abstract Expressionism would have become so central to modernism, let alone a unified and cohesive style. Returning now to the world of opera, in Kosky’s work we might see universal forms in his use of contrasts, from the stark shifts between symbols, to the extremities of emotions evoked. We might not immediately understand the point but that there is a point would be suggested by the repetition of extremes.13 But understanding his complex symbolism and confrontational imagery requires a significant level of effort on the part of the audience. The audience might of course treat the opera as an occasion for personal reverie, as a kind of springboard into private musings like many treat a Jackson Pollock painting in spite of Taylor’s findings, much like idly contemplating the flickering flames in an open hearth, but from what Kosky has said, this is anathema to his project. It would be like, in his words, “the effect of warm bolognaise sauce poured down the fronts of the audience” (O’Neill 1989)—an attitude to opera he rails against. Kosky’s work has been characterised as expressionist. We saw earlier what is meant by expressionism in painting. We saw that expressionism’s extreme subjectivity relies on a very cooperative and well-informed audience if it is not to become like “warm bolognaise sauce . . . down the fronts of the audience”. There seems to be two alternatives here. The audience either does their due diligence to enter Kosky’s world or they treat it as a springboard to their own reverie/wish-fulfilment in which case the work remains a spectacle for the audience. Opera has become a kind of shibboleth—a way of sorting the cultural elites from the hoi polloi. Consider The Knot Garden. Anyone unfamiliar with the characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest would not have been able to follow the last act of the opera or at least only partially so. Kosky wants his operas to be accessible, but he expects the audience to come all the way, not half-way. It is tempting to suppose that Kosky wants his aesthetic and attitudes to meld into a new convention. Unless an audience is familiar with his previous works and understands them, they will not be able to understand any new work. To understand these requires adopting not only certain musical preferences but also an explicit and sometimes erotically fuelled sensibility: a matter of taste that might be called the Kosky aesthetic.

12

Thanks to the editor James Phillips for this observation. For further discussions of repetition in Kosky’s Australian theatre productions, see Charlotte Farrell’s work in Chap. 5. See John Severn’s analysis of Kosky’s Bayreuth staging of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Chap. 9 for examples of repetition in Kosky’s operatic work. 13

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Kosky says that opera addresses realism, by which he means psychological realism. For example, he interprets Eugene Onegin in terms of the emotional lives of the two main protagonists (Operavision 2019). Among his objectives in this and other operas is to distinguish opera from fantasy, to provide something other than an easy escape at the theatre. Opera needs to do more than decorate a stage, he says. There is a realism to opera which he finds more total and intense than is possible in any other art form. But it is a realism that he accesses or reveals through mystery, by which he must mean a realism of norms (including what is considered an appropriate form for feelings to take) rather than facts. So when Kosky speaks of mystery being a crucial ingredient of opera he is not talking about escapism. I have focussed above almost exclusively on staging and set design, with the view to see how it augments the interpretation of the score. This is justified in Kosky’s early career as his relationship with set and costume designers, lighting engineers and choreographers was highly collaborative. In most cases he would be the one to select those he would be working with; in fact, many times he did most of the roles himself. But it must be said, that of all the reviews I have read, regardless of how the reviewer felt about the design and sets, the music is always praised; the clarity and vividness of the singing and orchestration is a common factor. Given most opera critics in Melbourne in the later 1980s and throughout the 1990s would have had a background in music rather than theatre criticism, this praise is highly significant.14 Perhaps Kosky achieves for his performers the conditions by which they can elicit the most intense experiences from the audience. The sets and design may draw the best from the performers, and this is the way the work achieves Kosky’s aims, even when the sets and design considered in isolation remain a spectacle for the audience, as some reviewers suggest. This extract from a 1990 review captures how many reviewers responded to Kosky’s work during his Melbourne period up till the late 1990s: Kosky’s direction is, as usual, symbol-heavy. Some of it is clear, other sections impenetrable or elusive. It is insufficient to categorise it as contemporary-obscure because the sources drawn on are historically wide-ranging but accessible. Certainly there is always something to look at as the cast members are called on to work very hard. But there are times when the activity distracts and you wish that the focus stayed on the music rather than yet another piece of “business”. Theatrically, then, this ‘Belshazzar’ is something of a hotch-potch. Doubtless the more informed one is about Jewish culture and practices, the more the oddities acquire meaning. My chief memory of the evening, however, apart from the recurrent fog, is of musical briskness and passion that are quite exceptional, well worth enduring a sequence of arcane coups de théâtre (O’Connell 1990).

Drawing the threads together, Kosky uses often outrageous imagery to evoke intense levels of engagement in the music of his operas. The meaning and significance that is attributed to the works may well be culturally specific. But it is undeniable that Kosky achieves a unique aesthetic which relies on the audience’s

14 Thanks to the editor John Severn for raising this point about the expertise of the opera critics at the relevant time in Melbourne.

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imagination to make of his works a foray into new emotional territory, and hence an occasion to redraw the concepts through which we make sense of our experience. There is a recognizable formal visual aspect to his work which reflects the extreme contrasts of ideas and emotion, from the use of spotlight techniques to isolate performers and heighten the drama; to the warm background-sourced-light which seems to silhouette the performers in a kind of Platonist cave of irreality. Then there is his love of crowds either swarming the stage or organised in tight bundles here and there; and colour is always used in such a way that one feels there is a specific intent there even if one is unsure what it is. In this chapter I have focussed on Kosky’s early career but no account of an early career is complete without a sense of how that early career represents the seeds of a mature body of work. No one familiar with Kosky’s work today would deny that his particular vision and aesthetic emerged early. He has garnered a reputation for focussing on themes and ideas through his determination to develop new interpretations which he would argue are truer of the original work than what in many cases has become the norm. And this focus continues to characterise his work. He interweaves a complex combination of symbols and cultural or historical references, so that there is little chance of the audience being lost in wish-fulfilment at the expense of reflection. And his language of formal contrasts discussed earlier in both symbolism and visual design, including blocking and choreography, marks an intention; an intention the audience is invited to interpret. I included the extract from O’Connell’s 1990 review above because while we can see how the same approach is taken by Kosky in his recent work—the rich and complex symbolism—it is instructive to find how differently the same approach can strike us today. Martin Kettle, a reviewer for The Guardian in the UK, reviewed Kosky’s production of the Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for the 2017 Bayreuth Festival. He discusses the production as a “riveting restaging” of the Wagner work and Kosky’s direction as “imaginative, subtle, and serious”. When explaining the complex interweaving of themes and references he asks the reader whether they are “Confused?” And answers for them: “It gets that way sometimes. You need A-level Wagner to get the most out of this show. Kosky loves a busy stage picture. . . . But in acts two and three, he proves his sensibility by giving the piece more room to make its own musical case” (Kettle 2017). This embrace of Kosky’s aesthetic with its high energy staging and complex symbolism is typical of the way his work is now received. This production was for an audience with “A-level Wagner”, such is the reputation and acclaim associated with the Bayreuth Festival. But as with Kosky’s early works, reviewers of all stripes continue to appreciate the high standards of performance the conditions for which Kosky is consistently able to create. Kettle praises “the level of collaboration and connection between pit and stage” and the conductor’s “supple conducting . . . moulded around Kosky’s staging”. He then refers to the high quality of the singing, using terms like “probing and sensitive”, “models of tonal control and expressivity” and characterisations such as “rendered without vocal or dramatic caricature”. He then concludes, after giving high praise to the various performers, “But it is Kosky’s evening. . . . Kosky’s Meistersinger is a reminder that Bayreuth can still score palpable dramatic hits too”. In this production

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Kosky explores whether Wagner’s antisemitism undermines his musical genius.15 A heady theme for an opera, one might think, but typical of contemporary treatments of Wagner. Kosky would relish such a challenge. I have suggested above that it is Kosky’s use of formal contrasts that constitutes his language of opera. That language alerts the audience to an intention to communicate something even though what that something is requires a further process. And it is now our task to examine this further process regarding how interpretation proceeds so that mystery and meaning are reconciled. In fact, Kosky has pinpointed a central notion in aesthetic theory when he talks about mystery in the context of interpretation and meaning. This notion pertains to the way creative artists evoke ideas in the audience by engaging their imaginations. They can be quite focused ideas, but they are ideas sourced from the audience’s own experience rather than the artist’s, and hence felt all the more powerfully because of that.

Kosky’s Aesthetic Ideas: Through the Looking Glass Throughout this chapter I have questioned the basis of the communicative capacity of Kosky’s daring and often unprecedented operatic symbolism; and suggested that he develops a language of contrasts to accommodate his expressive aims. Now in order to suggest a vehicle for the communicative capacity of his language of contrasts and make sense of his explicit aims of mystery and meaning, I turn to Kantian aesthetics. Kant distinguished an aesthetic experience which was more than a simple sensation. However, it was central to his conception that the relevant experiences were not grasped as determinate propositions like a final verdict. As such one could not communicate an aesthetic experience with direct explicit inferences such as one would communicate facts or information. Nonetheless he wanted to show how such experiences could be more than idiosyncratic daydreams. In response to this challenge, Kant emphasized the reflective character of the kind of experience he had in mind. He argued that the experience was such that it prompted a kind of judgment but not the kind that involved a direct explicit inference. Instead it is a judgment of feeling and so, according to the nomenclature of Kant’s time, it is non-cognitive (CJ AK 5: 228, §15).16 Yet for Kant, the experience of aesthetic reflective judgment involves ascribing ideas to the object (construing the object as meaningful), and this implicates imagining in addition to reflection.

15

For extended discussions, analysis and contextualisation of Kosky’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, see Michael Halliwell’s work in Chap. 8 and John Severn’s work in Chap. 9. 16 References to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment use the standard citation format for Kant’s works, based on the Akademie Edition (1902–1938). In this standard referencing system, the citation CJ AK 5: 228, §15, for example, refers to section 15, paragraph 228 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment in volume 5 of the Akademie Edition. Direct quotations from the Critique of the Power of Judgment are from Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews’ translation in Kant (2000).

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This ingenious notion of Kant’s is that creative expression is not strictly speaking the communication of ideas from artist to audience but instead the evocation of ideas in the audience by way of prompts created by the artist. In this way, the audience experiences the artwork as expressing their own deeply felt experiences or ideas, even if in fact the audience ascribes the ideas to the work themselves. The creative element for the artist here is to find a way to prompt the experiences or ideas in the audience that are relevant to their own aims and objectives. The artist does not typically have this in mind as the process, but instead simply intends to access and communicate their own deeply felt experiences or ideas. Kosky seems to acknowledge this explanation himself when he talks about communicating what is in his head but creating in his audience a quasi-mystical experience. Kant called the ideas evoked/communicated in this way “aesthetic ideas”. According to Kant, the experience of aesthetic reflective judgment reveals aspects of our humanity and, particularly, our impulse to communicate deeply felt experiences. Kant writes that “being able to communicate one’s state of mind . . . carries a pleasure with it, [which] could easily be established . . . from the natural tendency of human beings to sociability” (CJ AK 5: 218, §9). But experiences like aesthetic reflective judgment challenge the limits of language because they evoke ideas “in an unbounded way” (CJ AK 5: 315, §49) which “no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (CJ AK 5: 314, §49; and AK 5: 320, §51).17 Nonetheless, we engage in various artistic pursuits designed to communicate these “aesthetic ideas,” and what grounds their communicative capacity is a dialogical form of judgment. The kind of exchanges that are prompted by interpretation between artist and audience, and between members of an audience, involve a calibration of terms of reference related to among other ideas, hierarchies of values and attitudes. Even when one interprets in isolation, the terms used are those internalized from one’s community and they bear the marks of that community’s values and attitudes. This is the sense in which aesthetic reflective judgment is a dialogical form of judgment. It is a form of judgment that involves ascribing ideas to experience—aesthetic ideas, which are based on the audience’s experience—but those ideas attain their meaning and significance in virtue of the cultural group from within which the relevant experiences become meaningful signs and symbols. What prompts this kind of exchange is the attempt to interpret the “language” of the opera when the opera seems structured to communicate something. When the formal features are structured harmoniously, such as can be created by juxtaposing extreme contrasts, that harmony signals a human intention and prompts the audience to interpret the meaning of that structure. For Kant, there is no conclusive way to establish whether any particular judgment or interpretation is correct, even when the calibration of feelings and terms between interlocutors feels like the basis of a universal agreement. As Kant himself conjectures, it may just be reasonable to assume that agreement on such matters, a common ground on matters of feeling, is possible, even if universal agreement is simply an ideal rather than ever an actuality.

17

For an account of aesthetic ideas in contemporary terms, see McMahon (2007).

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He refers to this common ground as the sensus communis (CJ AK: 5: 240, §22): the ability to judge in a way which takes into consideration the way others would judge (CJ AK: 5: 293, §40). In this way we can answer the question posed earlier about Kosky’s two aims: that opera should have mystery as a central driver and yet, prompt interpretation and meaning. In achieving this, the opera is a form of communication between the creator and the audience. Kant thought of the object of aesthetic reflective judgment as either beauty or sublimity. We need not consider the basis of the distinction between these two aesthetic experiences here. Suffice it to say that Kant argued that art is beautiful when its purpose is that the pleasure that accompanies the representations is a kind of cognition (as opposed to a sensation) (CJ AK: 5: 305, §44); furthermore, he concluded that beauty just was an expression of aesthetic ideas. Because imagining is now considered a central cognitive process, aesthetic reflective judgment can be considered a cognitive judgment, even though it neither relies on proofs nor direct inferences. The role of imagination distinguishes this kind of experience from a mere sensation or affect. The intensely subjective expression of a director can evoke aesthetic ideas in the audience when occasioned within contexts of shared meaning. In Kosky’s operas, references to love, liberation, freedom, spirituality, or the psychic transformation of the individual are provided by sometimes idiosyncratic and jarring symbols, and sometimes humorous references like a female protagonist (who is meant to satisfy the norms of female beauty) in a gorilla costume or a video showing an octopus (when a salacious character helps to drive the plot).18 But for the expression of such ideas to be insightful, and thus beautiful in Kant’s system, the ideas must implicate the audience’s imagination. So the notion we can take from Kant is that to ascribe the kind of ideas to an opera that can only be accessed through the imagination is to endorse the opera as an expression of those very ideas.19 And we have seen how this works. We experience the ideas rather than just thinking them because they are evoked in us, not given to us, by the work. And to evoke ideas in us requires a certain genius. As we saw in the Introduction to this chapter, for Kosky, “the more formalised and ritualised [opera] . . . is, the more fascinating it becomes. Opera is truthful, but it’s not real” (Christiansen 2016). At other times, Kosky has referred to the psychological reality of his operas (Operavision 2019). The point is that Kosky engages the imagination to stimulate ideas which prompt an intense and lively immersion in his

18

Kosky’s production of Carmen for Frankfurt Oper (2016) and the Royal Opera House, London (2018) included Carmen dressed in a gorilla costume and his 2005 production of The Marriage of Figaro for the Komische Oper Berlin included a monitor showing an octopus. Thanks to James Phillips for providing this latter example. Many of Kosky’s operas deal with the ability of the person to transform within a context of opposing dispositions. For example, his interpretations of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden (Melbourne Spoleto Festival 1989), The Magic Flute (Adelaide Arts Festival 2017, original Komische Oper Berlin 2012 (as Die Zauberflöte)), Eugene Onegin (Edinburgh Festival 2019, original Komische Oper Berlin 2016 (as Jewgeni Onegin)), to name a few. 19 For more on beauty relevant to this discussion, see McMahon (2020).

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operas. He uses signs and symbols in unorthodox ways in often surprising contexts; and his deep understanding of the music leads him to judge what kind of performances are required to do justice to the score and text. But it is arguably his sense of the form of opera, the form of a work, which creates his language of opera. His work might remain for us very often on the edge of incomprehension and yet the remarkable commitment to his vision that he secures from his performers, designers and other colleagues results in an equally through-the-looking-glass kind of commitment on the part of the audience. And both our commitment and that of the performers is in no small part due to the harmony of form by which we are drawn to the presence of a forceful intention, which we enjoy even when our notion of what it is cannot easily be articulated. This is the notion of aesthetic ideas; content that only beautiful form conveys in virtue of its harmony. In Kosky’s case, it is a harmony of extremes, welded together within a complex tangle of emotion. Mystery yes, but meaning also; through a complex process of signs and symbols wedded to harmonious musical and performative structure. Acknowledgments I would like to thank certain people and organisations for providing me with documents and access to videos. Claudia Funder (Arts Centre Melbourne) provided documents and other information from the ACM Kosky archive; Lesley Newton (Adelaide Festival Corporation) acquired access to The Magic Flute recording from the Komische Oper Berlin; Liz Hawkins (Adelaide Festival Centre) provided relevant contacts; the photographers Jeff Busby and John Gollings gave permission to reproduce their photographs; and Claudia Funder (Arts Centre Melbourne) provided the images; my Melbourne friends Peter and ’Vonne Greenberg shared many recollections, links and references concerning Barrie Kosky’s early and more recent work. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of this volume, James Phillips and John Severn, for detailed comments and helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Balodis, J. (1990). Opera must be an experience not a spectacle. Opera Australia, October. Carey, L. (1989). Interview with Barrie Kosky: Opera’s young star. The Jewish News, 8 September. Christiansen, R. (2016). Barrie Kosky Interview: I weep for ENO but it needs a clear identity. The Telegraph, 19 October. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opera/ what-to-see/barrie-kosky-interview-i-weep-for-eno-but-it-needs-a-clear-ident/. Connors, D. (1989). Interview with Barrie Kosky: A rising star. Melbourne Report, September. Craven, P. (1990a). A Tale of Two Directors. The Australian. Clipping (specific date missing) held in the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne with reference number 2010.007.016. Craven, P. (1990b). Kid Kosky: Wunderkind with knockout direction. The Australian, 31 January. Croggon, A. (1989). Review of The Knot Garden: One man’s opera obsession. The Herald Sun. Clipping (specific date missing) held in the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne with reference number 2010.007.016A. Croggon, A. (1990). Babylon in Confusion. The Bulletin, 14 August. Emerson, R. W. (1883). Essays. 2 vols. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Greenberg, C. (1961). Art and culture: Critical essays. Boston, MA: Beacon. Jones, A. (1989). Review of The Knot Garden: Opera of the month. Opera Australia, September.

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Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, M. (Ed.). (2014). The encyclopedia of aesthetics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kettle, M. (2017). Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg review—riveting restaging puts Wagner on trial. The Guardian, 28 July. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2017/jul/27/die-meistersinger-von-nurnberg-bayreuth-wagner-antisemitism. Kosky, B. (1989a). Sharing Angels. The Age Monthly Review, September. Kosky, B. (1989b). Paralysis or Prima Donnas. Essay typescript held in the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne with reference number 2010.007.016B. Kosky, B. (1990). Notes from the Director. In Victorian State Opera, The Barber of Seville, opera programme (touring version). Kosky, B. (1991). Director’s Notes. In Gilgul Theatre Company, The Dybbuk, theatre programme. Kosky, B. (2020). On ecstasy. Sydney: Hachette. McMahon, J. A. (2007). Aesthetics and material beauty: Aesthetics naturalized. New York: Routledge. McMahon, J. A. (2014). Art and ethics in a material world: Kant’s pragmatist legacy. London: Routledge. McMahon, J. A. (2020). Beauty. In Oxford research encyclopedia of literature. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1050. O’Connell, C. (1990). Musical briskness and passion amid fog. The Age, 3 August. O’Neill, V. (1989). Barrie Kosky Interview: The Knot Garden, Spoleto Festival. Farrago, August. Operavision. (2019). Komische Oper Berlin: Eugene Onegin: An interview with director Barrie Kosky about the Komische Oper Berlin’s production of Eugene Onegin. Operavision.eu. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://operavision.eu/en/library/performances/operas/ eugene-onegin-komische-oper-berlin. Payne, P. (1990). Mistakes maketh this man. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July. Prain, F. (1990). Howell sings barber in lead-up to Carmen. The Age, 30 March. Radic, L. (1991). Some risks in a year of living cautiously. The Age, 27 December. Romney, J. (1987). Review: King Lear: The New King Lear: combining Nazism, the evil empire in Star Wars, and funny noses. The Age, 20 March. Swed, M. (2013). Brilliant transformation of The Magic Flute. Los Angeles Times, 25 November. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2013nov-25-la-et-cm-la-opera-flute-review-20131125-story.html. Tarrant, D. (1993). A Genius for Outrage. The Sun-Herald, 14 November. Taylor, R. P., Micolich, A. P., & Jonas, D. (2000). Using science to investigate Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(8–9), 137–150. University of Melbourne. (2021a). Theatre archive: Don Giovanni and The Lulu Plays. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://must.unimelb.edu.au/1988/10/31/don-giovannithe-lulu-plays09101988-2/. University of Melbourne. (2021b). Theatre Archive: La Calisto. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://must.unimelb.edu.au/1987/09/30/la-calisto-17091987-2/.

Jennifer A. McMahon is a Professor in Philosophy at The University of Adelaide. She authored two monographs: Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2014) and Aesthetics and Material Beauty: Aesthetics Naturalized (Routledge 2007). She edited Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment: Pleasure, Reflection and Accountability (Routledge 2018) and the inaugural issue of the Australasian Philosophical Review (1:1, 2017) on “The Pleasure of Art”. McMahon has also guest-edited special editions of various journals including Curator: The Museum Journal (62:1, 2019); and written reference articles on Beauty, most recently for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2020).

Chapter 4

Something for Everybody? Art, Community, the Unfamiliar, and Barrie Kosky at the Adelaide Festival John R. Severn

Abstract In this chapter, I focus on Barrie Kosky’s work as an administrator, and on how this relates to discourse and practice around art, taste and community. In the first part I focus on Kosky’s time as Artistic Director of the 1996 Adelaide Festival, in which he demonstrated a competency with arts administration in ways that expanded the understanding of the role of Artistic Director beyond that shown by his predecessors. As a rare example of a young practising artist rather than a seasoned professional arts administrator in the role of a successful Artistic Director, Kosky paved the way for a string of practising artists at the Festival’s helm in subsequent years. In the second part, I frame the objections to Kosky’s Adelaide appointment in relation to other Australian approaches to season programming and to a discussion on art and community. What does it mean for an arts organisation to provide something for everybody? I argue that Kosky answers this by recognising a diversity of tastes undergirded by a shared orientation towards the new. I end the chapter by drawing links to Kosky’s work in Berlin in relation to barriers to access to the arts.

In this chapter, I focus on Barrie Kosky’s work as an administrator, and on the ways in which this has contributed to discourse and practice around art, taste and community. Administration is neither one of the theatrical world’s glamour jobs nor a prominent area of research and theorising within academic theatre studies. Nonetheless, it is a function with a significant amount of power over how individual productions, theatrical seasons, and performance companies are perceived by and engage with the communities within which they operate and, as this chapter argues, that they help to create. Kosky has been involved in arts administration since at least his university days, when, at the age of eighteen, he founded Treason of Images, an experimental theatre and opera company which he set up, directed, performed in and publicised. This was

J. R. Severn (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_4

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followed shortly after his leaving university by his founding of Gilgul, Australia’s first Jewish theatre company, discussed in Chap. 2. His three most prominent administration roles have been his time as the Artistic Director of the 1996 Adelaide Festival, as joint Artistic Director of the Schauspielhaus in Vienna from 2001–2005, and, since 2012, his current position as Intendant of the Komische Oper Berlin. In this chapter I begin by focussing on his time as Artistic Director of the 1996 Adelaide Festival, in which he demonstrated an orientation towards and competency with arts administration as a business in ways that expanded the understanding of the role of Artistic Director beyond that shown by his predecessors. I then frame the objections to his appointment in Adelaide in relation to other Australian approaches to season programming and to a discussion on art, the unfamiliar and community.

The Adelaide Festival of Arts The Adelaide Festival of Arts is a large mixed arts festival, similar to European festivals such as the Edinburgh International Festival (on whose model it was based) and the Festival d’Avignon, with a programme of high-quality performances across a range of artforms. The majority of these performances are usually sourced internationally. The festival proper is accompanied by a large Fringe Festival, second in size only to Edinburgh’s (Australia Council for the Arts 2018, p. 19). Opening towards the end of the Australian summer in late February or early March, the Adelaide Festival is Australia’s highest-profile arts festival, bringing in millions of dollars in revenue to Adelaide and, through associated tourism, to regional South Australia. Since 2012 it has been held annually, but for its first fifty years it was held every two years. The principal role of the festival’s Artistic Director is to curate a programme of events for his or her festival. Kosky’s appointment occurred towards the end of a period in the festival’s history during which Artistic Directors were appointed for a single festival, with no ostensible ongoing responsibility for future festivals.1 Key requirements for the role include an interest in and knowledge of a wide range of art forms and an awareness of international developments in the arts, as well as highlevel planning and organisational skills and the ability to manage a multimilliondollar budget. Prior to Kosky’s appointment, the Adelaide Festival in the majority of cases had been directed by an English, or English-educated, man with a substantial background in arts administration, rather than by practising artists.2 That Kosky was 1

Since Robyn Archer’s appointment for both the 1998 and 2000 festivals, the Adelaide Festival has seen a growing continuity from festival to festival, as, in a return to the festival’s practice in the 1960s and 1970s, Artistic Directors have been appointed for multiple festivals (Brett Sheehy 2006, 2008; Paul Grabowsky 2010, 2012; David Sefton 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016; Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy 2017–2023). 2 The first female Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival, Robyn Archer, was appointed for both the 1998 and 2000 festivals, immediately following Kosky’s time in the role. With Stephen Page,

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an Australian theatre director was therefore unusual, although not unprecedented (Jim Sharman had directed the critically acclaimed 1982 festival, and Sir Robert Helpmann had directed the 1970 festival). Kosky was the first Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival to be appointed through an open, advertised recruitment process, previous holders of the role having been appointed directly by the festival’s governing board (although the festival board approached Kosky to suggest he apply (Shmith 1993a)). At the time of Kosky’s appointment, the festival’s Artistic Director was appointed just under three years in advance of the festival for which he or she would be responsible. As I discuss below, Kosky approached his role differently from some of his predecessors, incorporating into his responsibilities those of salesman and promoter for the festival, engaging with access to art, and bringing in a concern for financial continuity with future festivals. In demonstrating that a practising artist was at least as capable as seasoned arts administrators of successfully running a major festival, he thus paved the way for a string of artistic directors with a background as practising artists.3

Setting the Scene for Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival As a result of issues arising in previous festivals, Kosky’s time as Artistic Director coincided with a period of change at the Adelaide Festival, especially in the festival’s organisational structure and in a focus on the festival’s financial position. On his appointment in 1993, the 1992 Adelaide Festival had already announced a large deficit. The 1994 festival ran into a number of problems that resulted in the festival running a large deficit for the second time in a row, as a consequence of which the festival had to ask the state government of South Australia for a financial bailout. The 1994 festival was directed by the then-New York-based Christopher Hunt, who had also directed the 1980 festival, and had a strong East Asian-Pacific theme: Hunt announced in 1992 that he intended that “a quarter of the ’94 program will be European-American. Another quarter will be Australian and half Asian-Pacific— ‘but leaving out India, northern Asia, Africa and the Middle East’” (Shmith 1992). The festival bore this out, with Germany, the UK and the US representing the European-American quarter. Japan played an especially prominent role in the Asian-Pacific half, alongside performances from Cambodia, China, the Cook Islands, Indonesia, Korea, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Vietnam and Western Samoa (as well as a film from the Philippines). A mixture of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian work made up the remaining quarter.

the Adelaide Festival had its first Indigenous appointment as Artistic Director. Since Page’s festival in 2005, the Artistic Directors have been Australians educated in Australia. 3 For example, singer, performer and writer Robyn Archer; opera and theatre director Peter Sellars; dancer, choreographer and director Stephen Page; dramaturg Brett Sheehy; pianist Paul Grabowsky; theatre, opera and film director Neil Armfield.

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In the face of initial sluggish ticket sales, the English Hunt was reported as attributing “the slow sales of tickets for his Asia-weighted program to Australian racism” (Broinowksi 1994). In interviews, Hunt tended to present his programme as a corrective to what he perceived to be Australia’s cultural status quo: “Australia, as Mr. Hunt saw it, has a ‘surrogate, substitute white culture’ derived from the ancient Greeks through the composer Beethoven and German writer Goethe to the presentday, but without Asian reference points such as the Indian classics, the Ramayana or Mahabharata” (Song 1994). If an Australia that traces its cultural heritage through Goethe is barely recognisable as a concept to most Australians, Hunt’s comments appeared repeatedly aimed at least at a white Australian population whose perceived assumptions he intended to challenge and correct, and more particularly at a conservative, white, Adelaide-resident, festival-going audience. Hunt claimed that his 1994 festival would not be one “which aims—as most festivals here have unconsciously aimed—just to please that relatively small group of the Adelaide establishment and the Australian arts establishment. I hope it will gain their approval, as those groups matter to me. But my real hope is attracting people who have not been to a festival before: people from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds” (Shmith 1993b). Hunt appeared to expect audiences to feel uncomfortable with his programme: “‘it comes down to human nature’, he reasoned, ‘the resistance we all have initially to something strange and new’” (Cochrane 1994). Despite this, in interview after interview, Hunt seemed focused on changing the perceived outlook of a primarily white, Adelaide-resident audience by insult and confrontation, rather than on changing audiences by, for example, education and outreach programmes, by a marketing approach that explained what audiences might enjoy in particular shows, or by a sustained engagement with Australia’s diverse population of non-European heritage. Not an obvious salesperson (as one journalist put it, “although he has plenty of experience to offer, it is often brusquely phrased in ways his audience does not appreciate” (Shmith 1992)), Hunt appeared to be unaware of the risks of spending more than 2 years insulting one’s (apparent) core market without having built new markets to replace it, and/or to view concerns about audience-building, sales and financial viability as not being part of the role of the festival’s artistic director. Indeed, in an interview with Melbourne newspaper The Age in June 1992, he claimed that box-office receipts were not important. Instead, as he told a journalist, you have to throw all the arguments the other way round, question if we are right that it’s better always to have more people and better always to have more performances. Or that when something is a success it can be taken on tour so everyone else can see it. That’s completely wrong. There is something important about things being done for only a short time to a small number of people. If they learn and spread the lesson, then fine; it gets to far more people then. Festivals are there to do what can’t be done at any other time (Shmith 1992).

For Hunt, “one should really put on festivals for the artists, not the public. ... Artists want to see each other’s performances and have the time and leisure not to rush in and out, but see the place, meet people, talk to their opposite numbers and have the chance for that flowering of ideas that happens in some places” (Shmith 1992).

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His aim (not brought to fruition) was to persuade the festival board to fund performers to stay in Adelaide for the duration of the festival to allow this to happen (Shmith 1992). While there were certainly racist attitudes expressed by journalists about Hunt’s Asian-Pacific-themed programme, in fact, other factors beyond repertoire choice and audience attitudes were at play in the poor financial outcome of the festival. First, the number of performances was significantly lower than normal, as Hunt expressly aimed to slim down the festival’s offerings so that it was possible for a festivalgoer to attend a showing of every production (Shmith 1993b). Second, the festival programme was launched in November 1993. However, the Booking Guide did not include details of all performances, and there was a delay of almost two months before tickets and performance details for some events became available. While the performances from Cambodia, the Cook Islands, Korea, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Western Samoa were given brief mentions in the festival booking brochure, the brochure failed to give dates, times or details of what would be performed, saying instead that “Full program & booking details will be published in January” (Adelaide Festival 1993). Those with interests in specific Asian or Pacific cultures or art forms were thus unable to plan their festival early and in one go, a particular problem for out-of-town visitors who needed to book accommodation and transport. Further, at the launch of the festival programme in November 1993, Hunt announced that a third of the tickets for every performance would be priced very cheaply at AUD 10 (Evans 1993) (in fact, this excluded a black-tie opening event for Dido and Aeneas by the Mark Morris Dance Company, all tickets for which were priced at AUD 75 or AUD 65 for Festival Friends). Most of these AUD 10 tickets could be booked in advance (with a maximum of two per order), with no restrictions on who could take advantage of the offer. This replaced the means-based concession system of reduced-price tickets that the unemployed, students and pensioners had been able to book in advance for previous festivals. A further allocation of AUD 10 tickets, not bookable in advance, was released on the day of performance “to encourage audiences to respond to word-of-mouth” (Evans 1993). As a result, audiences displayed a reluctance to buy full-price tickets in advance of the performance. In addition, while top-price tickets for the festival’s opening event are usually expensive—and thus a money-maker for the festival—all tickets for the 1994 Opening Ceremony were priced at AUD 10, and were allocated by ballot. In an example of the contradictions and a focus on disparaging existing audiences that dogged his public pronouncements, Hunt, who had previously referred to Adelaide’s State Theatre as “an example of the deadening theatrical influence of postwar democracy, the classless theatre which puts everyone on an even bank. It kills theatre” (Shmith 1992), described this move “as a ‘most symbolic change’. Opening nights will no longer be the exclusive preserve of the Adelaide establishment” (Evans 1993). Again, that festivalgoers had to wait to hear the result of the ballot for weeks after tickets for other festival events went on sale meant that it was awkward for out-of-town visitors to make decisions about booking accommodation and travel.

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Kosky’s Telstra Adelaide Festival 96 In the wake of the 1994 festival, there was therefore a more than usually strong focus on repertoire choice, financial viability, and planning and organisational competency during Kosky’s time as Artistic Director. Working with a budget of AUD 11 million, Kosky and his team at the 1996 festival mounted a critically and financially successful programme, with over 705,000 attendances at 422 performances (a more than fifty-percent increase on the 1994 festival’s offerings), and featuring almost 1200 international and Australian artists (Adelaide Festival 2010, p. 6). The festival’s geographical range stretched wider than it had previously, with performances from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and the Caribbean. In many cases, countries were represented by national minorities: India by West Bengali Bauls, Italy by Sardinians, the Russian Federation by Tuvans, Spain by Catalans, among others. Europe was also represented by some of its smaller nations, some, such as Denmark and Slovenia, appearing at the festival for the first time. Whereas the 1994 festival had tended to showcase readily identifiable national performing art forms (traditional Chinese acrobatic circus, Indonesian wayang kulit shadow puppets, Japanese bunraku and kyōgen, Vietnamese water puppets), Kosky’s festival shone a spotlight on transnational and transcultural offerings that blurred national borders. Examples included a South African puppet theatre performing classics of German theatre adapted to South African settings, incorporating Japanese bunraku puppet techniques and juxtaposing French classical music with 1950s Tanzanian swing, and a Japanese theatre company engaging with the work of a 1930s Polish avant-garde artist. The offerings were wide-ranging in genre as well as geographical origin, from opera, theatre, symphony and chamber music to Mongolian throat-singing, Australian rock music, Nancy Sinatra and Turkish dervishes, from Catholic ritual to the “Post-Porn Modernist” Annie Sprinkle. As the festival’s transnational offerings drew attention to borrowings and influences, so its genre divisions were often blurred in works that combined multiple genres, or drew their inspiration from other art forms. The interrelationship between architecture and a wide range of other art forms was a particularly strong feature of Kosky’s festival. Kosky presented his festival as accessible through three themes: ecstasy, mapping, and utopia. While festivalgoers were free to choose any combination of events, the Booking Guide presented them with possibilities for creating their own links between cultures in ways that framed the events through one or more of these themes. Festivalgoers interested in exploring mysticism and performance, for example, might purchase tickets for the Whirling Dervishes of Konya, the Bauls of Bengal and The Song Company’s performance of the Catholic rite of Tenebrae, perhaps focusing on the ecstatic in performance, perhaps mapping unexpected pathways between cultures separated by significant distance, perhaps making utopian connections between apparently widely differing religious traditions. Those interested in forms of vocal production might follow the Booking Guide’s “Singing Map”, exposing themselves to the Bauls of Bengal’s ecstatic singing and The Song Company’s Italian Renaissance music, along with Yungchen Lhamo’s Tibetan

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devotional singing, the Throat Singers of Tuva, who perform in a state of trance, the Sardinian Tenores di Bitti’s “guttural timbre and unmistakable intonation jumps”, Cameroon-born Francis Bebay’s “various African vocal techniques”, Sainkho Mantchylak’s Siberian lamastic shamanist singing and Mongolian throat singing, and Begum Parveen Sultana and Ustad Dilshad Khan’s Hindustani classical singing. Likewise, audiences were invited to explore the relationship between architecture, ecstasy and various forms of music for hammered or plucked strings via the Booking Guide’s suggested Tensile Structures pathway. A key aspect of these themes and pathways was that they set up frames that encouraged festivalgoers to see connections between disparate historical periods, geographical locations or art forms. Further, the 1996 festival differed from the 1994 one in its approach to the unfamiliar. In contrast to Hunt’s public framing of audience attitudes to the unfamiliar as a problem to be solved by confrontation and correction, the 1996 festival’s thematic approach provided audiences with pathways that invited them to make their own decision to experience unfamiliar art forms and cultures alongside more familiar ones in ways that felt logical and comfortable to them. The festival’s thematic approach was also effective marketing. Festival brochures are often confusing even to seasoned festivalgoers, due to the sheer breadth of programming. A suggested grouping such as “The Singing Map” not only helps navigate a brochure, but encourages festivalgoers to buy tickets to more events than they might otherwise, and frames their decision-making in a different way. With an unthematized brochure, a festivalgoer might choose one or two concerts of the more unfamiliar forms of singing: their decision is which concert(s) to choose. “The Singing Map” presented purchasing tickets for all eight constituent concerts as natural: for those who could not attend all of them, the decision was which concert(s) to eliminate. If the 1996 festival was particularly wide-ranging in its geographical sources, Kosky’s themes of mapping and utopia assisted in creating a festival that was also unusually embedded in the city of Adelaide. Indeed, as Kosky explained in an interview, Adelaide, a planned city founded in 1836, “was at one stage going to be called Utopia” (Gallasch 1995). As Mary Ann Hunter (2004) has analysed in detail, Kosky’s festival aimed to draw attention to competing visions and histories of Adelaide, to the tensions and connections between urban movement and stasis, between space and identity, between Indigenous, settler and recent migrant experiences. This was accomplished in a range of ways, from installations relating to the life of Colonel Light, who designed the city’s centre and was one of Adelaide’s founding fathers, and the architecture of “Ruins of the Future”, through Indigenous art exhibitions on the theme of Indigenous land rights, a convention on the meeting of art and architecture, a series of banquets celebrating Adelaide’s multicultural culinary heritage, to a “Singing Loudspeaker” that accompanied sunrise and sunset over the River Torrens with “live chanting that will waft through the city” (Adelaide Festival 1995). A section of the festival’s visual arts programme was embedded in Norwood, an Adelaide suburb with a post-war history of European migration, especially from Italy. Fifteen artists exhibited their work in suburban Norwood private homes,

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accompanied by a series of speakers “examining notions of public and private space, the construction of idiosyncratic identity and representations of the contemporary suburb”, a part of the festival’s programmed designed to “propel visual arts debate into the streets, backyards, Scout halls and living rooms of Adelaide” (Adelaide Festival 1995). Strengthening Kosky’s framing of Adelaide as a city of suburbs, rather than as the city of Hunt’s “Adelaide establishment”, a central image of Kosky’s festival was that of the Hills Hoist, a rotary clothes line manufactured in Adelaide since 1945 that for many is symbolic of suburban Australia.4 A Hills Hoist was a central and striking feature of Kosky’s programme launch, an event Adelaide critic Murray Bramwell (1995) nicknamed “the clothesline summit”: “seated on top of the familiar domestic rotary, festooned with red lights, Barrie Kosky, Artistic Director, announced details of the 1996 Telstra Adelaide Festival”. An image of a hand grasping a Hills Hoist, flaming like an Olympic torch, was used for posters and for the cover of the festival brochure, with a clothes peg replacing the first A of Adelaide; during the festival Hills Hoists were erected across the city and even in the River Torrens. As Mary Ann Hunter (2004, pp. 41–42) puts it, “in the words of critic Murray Bramwell, ‘they [the clothes-lines] succeeded in being all things to all consumers—icons of nostalgia, satiric swipes at gendered drudgery, ripostes to the Cringe, and highly successful monuments to the consolations of corporate sponsorship’. For those more keyed into the striated codifications of establishment arts practice, the unique geometry of the quintessentially Australian Hills Hoist brought into comic relief a collective memory of order and regulation: a playful and ironic deviation from the grid pattern of a highly mythologised past inscribed in Adelaide’s urban plan”.5 I would argue that they were also a savvy marketing tool that both presented the Festival’s unfamiliar aspects in a network of the familiar, and suggested that the Festival actively welcomed suburban Adelaideans alongside the city’s “establishment” and out-of-state visitors. Kosky’s approach to the festival as a whole also displayed his orientation towards marketing and public relations as well as to season planning. This revealed itself in his self-presentation as the salesman for a product—the festival and its individual events. Whatever frustrations he may have had with his role, Kosky ensured with remarkable consistency that his product rather than himself was placed at the centre of his public-facing engagements. When faced with questions about objections to himself and his work (discussed further below), Kosky would simply counter them (often robustly: “I think Mr. Pearson should keep his mouth shut before my programme is announced because it does great damage to the Festival and great damage to Adelaide in the short term when someone who is [as] ill-informed and ignorant as Mr. Pearson about the Festival—he’s never run an arts festival, he’s not an artist—should be making comments like that” (Nicholl 1995)), and move the

4 Kosky had already featured a Hills Hoist as a piece of practical stage furniture in his 1989 production of The Knot Garden. 5 Quoting Murray Bramwell, “Our Revels Now Ended”, The Adelaide Review, April 1996.

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conversation to the subject of the festival itself, without complaining in general terms about Australia, Adelaide, or audiences. Whereas Hunt had consistently portrayed his relationship with the Adelaide Festival board in insulting and antagonistic ways, Kosky and others stressed smooth working relationships behind the scenes. A radio interview with Kosky by Keith Conlon and a report of a speech by Andrew Killey, the chair of the board, are typical of the consistent message of good collaboration in the festival’s administration: KEITH CONLON. Well, it certainly is a new festival in terms of the structure behind the scenes—a new board, a new chair and all that sort of stuff. Who’s driving now, the new structure—chairman Andrew Killey or director Barrie Kosky, or is it a nice consortium? BARRIE KOSKY. It’s a consortium. I mean, what you’ve got is, you’ve got a very energetic new chairman, Andrew Killey. He comes from a marketing and advertising background, I mean he’s a fantastic dynamo and comes from outside the arts industry, so has passion, aggression, drive and whatever, and then you’ve got Iain Scobie, who’s been appointed, has been appointed as the general manager, he was the administrative director and now he’s the general manager, who has worked on more festivals than anyone else in the city so he’s fantastically knowledgeable. And then you’ve got me sort of driving the artistic ideas. The three of us work very much in conjunction and are a very, very—I think—exciting and potent sort of force (Conlon 1995). At the launch, the chair of the Festival Board, ad-man Andrew Killey described himself as the luckiest person since Ringo Starr. “I came into the Festival at a time of complete review, restructuring and refocusing”, [Andrew Killey] explains, “at a time when government demonstrated interest in making the festival even better. I get a terrific guy like Ian Scobie as general manager, a good marketing team, and, then the cream on the cake, you get a bloke like Barrie Kosky as Artistic Director. Apart from the program and its variety—he is such a great enthusiast for it all. He loves to talk to everybody, to cocktail parties, to the media, to everybody” (Bramwell 1995).

These reports may well have reflected the truth. However, what was important at a time of organisational change and a focus on the festival’s finances was that nothing should distract from a focus on the product—the events that formed the festival—a focus that Kosky and the rest of the festival’s administration were rigorously disciplined in maintaining. In contrast to Hunt, who was “rarely seen at the Festival”, Kosky was “visible on the ground in the long lead-up to [the Festival’s opening] in March and he was the program’s number one fan” (McKinnon 2020, p. 229). As Murray Bramwell described a meeting with Kosky, He tells me he has just completed his seventh Hills hoisting, a six o’clock spruik in the Festival Theatre organised for anyone-who-might-be-interested. But even as he describes his glittering reprise the energy returns. Kosky is, without doubt, one of the Adelaide Festival’s little engines that can . . . it is true to say that since he took the director’s job he has been the most visible and attentive festival planner anyone can remember. The ubiquity is certainly highly self-conscious—to the point that his owlish specs and serious-young-insect press photos should have ™ stamped next to them. But he has also mixed and mingled, listened to those around him and generally put himself into caffe latte society (Bramwell 1995).

As Kosky put it, “marketing comes from the programme—the actual quality of your programme” (Nicholl 1995). In interviews, Kosky was consistently enthusiastic

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about the festival as a whole and the events comprising it. While other artistic directors were apologetic about their choices, framed their festivals as idiosyncratic expressions of their personal tastes, and generally kept the focus of discussion on themselves and the difficulties of creating a festival, Kosky relentlessly foregrounded the events themselves. As he put it, “it is the Adelaide Festival, it’s not the Barrie-Kosky-from-Melbourne Festival” (Conlon 1995). If this seems like basic marketing sense, Kosky’s difference from previous Artistic Directors can be seen in the Artistic Director’s introduction to the Booking Guide over a number of years. This introduction is the Artistic Director’s opportunity to sell the festival, to frame it as attractive to particular audiences, and to make people want to be part of it. Christopher Hunt did not provide an introduction to the 1994 festival Booking Guide, but a comparison of extracts from the introductions to the 1990 and 1992 Booking Guides with Kosky’s introduction shows striking differences: In this brief, exclamatory note of introduction to the 1990 Adelaide Festival program, it is not my intention to point out themes and sub-themes, references or cross references, the nuance here, the resonance there. What may appear as the occasional eccentric inclusion can be defended, just as the questioned exclusion can be explained. Final choice in programming is frequently a matter of the imagined giving way to—or being moderated by—the practical and achievable reality. Festival programming was not meant to be easy! That is probably one of the few points on which all of my illustrious predecessors would agree. The result of our planning resides here in the booking brochure. The surprise and discovery is left to you. We believe that we have not brought anything from the farther or nearer shores of Yawndom and it is our fervent hope that we may have found a way into your wishes. We will be delighted if you think there are almost too many good things from which to choose. [. . . ] (Clifford Hocking in Adelaide Festival 1989) In the occasionally rarified world of international festivals, the multi-arts Medusa is perhaps the exception rather than the rule. Great theatre, dance, jazz, fine music, world music, puppetry, performance art, visual arts, literary, and (even!) mime festivals of a specialist nature abound. The festival that attempts to bite off, chew, and, more importantly, digest the lot inevitably presents its organizers with a bewildering world of choice, the baying of sectionally-interested hounds, an insufficiently loaded purse and a public that, while enthusiastic, might just as well be bewildered by their choices. The Board of the Adelaide Festival has boldly determined that the most satisfactory resolution to these ponderables is to allow its Director to chart a distinctly personal course through the minefield, putting faith in the theory that, in satisfying himself (perhaps one day soon herself), the Director will also satisfy the many legitimate stakeholders in this vital enterprise. I can only hope, therefore, that you will find all or some of my taste to yours and, if not, offer the comfort that a new set of artistic tastebuds will be in operation next time! What you are about to read thus represents the exercise of a personal view at the artistic watershed provided by this biennial opportunity to put culture where it should be for more of the time—in a position of acknowledged importance to the society we create and in which, for good or ill, we must live. If this sounds like the bark of one of those sectional mongrels, so be it! [. . .] (Rob Brookman in Adelaide Festival 1991).

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The 19th Biennial Adelaide Festival—Australia’s International Arts Festival. 17 DAYS AND NIGHTS OF DEBATE, DISSENT, ENTERTAINMENT AND EUPHORIA ECSTASY [N.

EXALTED FEELING, RAPTURE (ESP. OF DELIGHT); STATE OF NERVES IN WHICH MIND IS

OCCUPIED SOLELY BY ONE IDEA; TRANCE; POETIC FRENZY]

Experience some of the world’s leading artists as they electrify, provoke, amuse and transform you. Australia’s largest multi-arts celebration of music, dance, theatre, literature and visual arts. MAP [N.

REPRESENTATION OF

(PART

OF) EARTH’S SURFACE SHOWING PHYSICAL AND POLITICAL

FEATURES, ETC. OR OF THE HEAVENS]

Experience work from the cities of Tel Aviv, St Petersburg, New York, Ljubljana, Johannesburg, Barcelona, Melbourne, Brussels, Adelaide, Hachinohe, Paris, Lhasa, Copenhagen, London, Delhi and Konya. UTOPIA [N. (PLACE)]

IDEALLY PERFECT PLACE OR STATE OF THINGS

(¼

NOWHERE F.

GR.

OU (NOT)

+

TOPOS

Experience the political Utopia, the religious Utopia, the abstract Utopia, the fantastical Utopia, the geographic Utopia and the destroyed Utopia. 17 DAYS & NIGHTS OF MIND-BLOWING, FOOT-STOMPING, MOUTHSCREAMING INTOXICATION. Map your way through the Festival program and experience a joyous celebration of artists and their work (Barrie Kosky in Adelaide Festival 1995)

These quotations from Hocking and Brookman are part of much longer introductions of block text that proceed at the level of the paragraph. While Hocking and Brookman address their readers in patrician terms, with long sentences, intricate subclauses, and abstruse imagery and vocabulary, Kosky grabs his readers by playing with font and addresses his readers in sentence fragments. Where Hocking and Brookman place the challenges of their own roles at the centre of their message, Kosky places the festival and potential audience members at the centre of his. While Hocking and Brookman suggest the possibility that the reader will be disappointed and confused, Kosky promises a range of intense experiences. While the introductions to the 1990 and 1992 festivals give no information about the festival offerings, the 1996 introduction covers genres and geographical provenances. Whereas Hocking primes the reader to be confused by the variety of the brochure’s contents and Brookman suggests that, if there is a way to navigate the festival, it is known only to him, Kosky introduces his themes, and suggests not only that his readers have the capacity and agency to “map [their] way through the Festival program”, but that this will lead to a joyous experience. This is not to say that Hocking and Brookman were incompetent marketers of their work (their patrician style may have been tailored towards an audience, albeit a narrow one), but to draw attention to the difference in conception of the role of artistic director between Kosky and his predecessors. Kosky’s engagement with marketing, his concern with the audience experience and with communicating with potential audience members who may be unfamiliar

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with the arts in ways that made access to art seem exciting and pleasurable represented an unusually wide, committed and energetic approach to the role of the artistic director. In terms of financial accessibility, Kosky’s festival mostly returned to the pre-1994 model, offering unlimited concessionary tickets to all to Australian pensioners, the unemployed and students under twenty-six years old for most shows, at a reduction of around 25% of the full ticket price. Depending on the event, this resulted in concession-rate prices ranging from AUD 12 to AUD 55. The average concession-rate ticket was priced in the low AUD 20s. The opening event, an openair concert in Adelaide’s large Elder Park, was free and unticketed. In addition, several theatre productions offered “preview” performances at significantly reduced rates for all compared to their “official” run. In contrast, the opening night of OzOpera’s production of The Magic Flute offered no concessionary tickets and tickets sold at a fifty-percent mark-up on full-price tickets for the remaining performances of the opera, which did offer concessionary rates. As corporate sponsorship usually comes with a ticket allocation that the sponsor can use to entertain clients, an air of exclusivity is of course a useful selling point for potential sponsors. Indeed, sponsorship increased in profile at the 1996 festival. While the prominence and amount of sponsorship had fluctuated from festival to festival, the 1990s had seen a downward trend in the number of corporate sponsors, with twenty-five corporate sponsors in 1990, twenty-one in 1992, and sixteen in 1994.6 Although only four sponsors were carried over from the 1994 to the 1996 festivals, the number of sponsors increased to twenty-eight (including, of course, Hills, the manufacturers of Hills Hoists), as did their prominence within festival marketing material. Most noticeably, a new category of Naming Rights Sponsor resulted in the festival’s official title changing to the “Telstra Adelaide Festival”, the form it would retain for the following two festivals. Channel 9 Adelaide and The Australian, new sponsors from the media sector, were brought in as Key Sponsors, the highest level of sponsorship below Naming Rights Sponsor. This was part of a significant expansion of sponsors from the media sector, a strategically efficient move, as sponsorship from that sector not only provided financial support, but also publicity to a range of disparate potential audience demographics beyond Hunt’s “Adelaide establishment”. Other corporate sponsors included the Adelaide radio stations FiveAA (a commercial talkback station), 5ADFM (a “classic hits” station) and SAFM (contemporary hits); the television broadcasters 7 Adelaide (commercial, popular programming), Channel 10 (commercial, popular programming) and SBS (public broadcaster, with an international outlook and responsibility for multicultural broadcasting); and the Adelaide daily newspaper, The Advertiser. An article in The Adelaide Review noted Kosky’s direct involvement in negotiating corporate sponsorship (Bramwell 1995). While, with a very few exceptions, there had been little consistency of sponsors from festival to festival, the article discussed Kosky’s negotiation of three-festival sponsorship packages. Kosky’s

6

These figures exclude in-kind sponsorship, such as Qantas’ regular role as the “Festival Airline”.

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healthy confidence in approaching sponsorship negotiations as exercises in selling the benefits of association with Kosky’s product rather than as asking for money was in evidence from as far back as his Treason of Images days at university.7 What is significant here is that, at a time when the Adelaide Festival appointed Artistic Directors for single festivals, these negotiations for three-festival packages demonstrated a commitment to the festival’s ongoing success and stability beyond Kosky’s own immediate responsibility, a commitment in stark contrast to Kosky’s portrayal as an iconoclast in discussions surrounding his appointment.

Something for Everyone? With his 1996 Adelaide Festival, Kosky managed to curate a programme of events that included the avant-garde and the popular, that embedded the wide-rangingly international within the local, that confirmed the success of the festival’s new organisational structure and that—crucially—did not repeat the losses of the previous two festivals. The festival itself was widely praised, and Kosky was credited personally with its success even by some who had reacted negatively to his appointment. For example, critic Michael Morley began his summary of what he described as “this bustling, strutting and always engaging” 1996 festival in The Australian Financial Review with While there were some (myself included) who had reservations about the initial process of Barrie Kosky’s appointment for the 1996 Adelaide Festival, only the most jaundiced commentators could now deny that he built a program packed with vital, visionary, populist and innovative works. The previous incumbent tended, like Achilles, to sulk in his tent, bemoaning the shortsightedness of the media, the public or the artistic deities. Kosky, by contrast, donned glasses, rode motorbikes, presented the weather on TV, and generally made sure that Adelaide had a director who went for visibility, putting his program and himself on the (Hills Hoist) line (Morley 1996).

The 1996 festival thus proved that an artistically, financially and organisationally successful festival could be put on by a practising artist from Australia rather than by a professional arts administrator from overseas. However, as Michael Morley’s report suggests, if Kosky’s festival was a success, his time as Artistic Director in the lead-up to the festival was marked by controversy. To be appointed as the festival’s Artistic Director is a major career event. This was even more the case for Kosky, who was twenty-six when his appointment was announced in June 1993, and was thus the festival’s youngest-ever appointment to the post. Kosky’s appointment was met with resistance on a number of fronts. For some, it was felt that “it wasn’t yet his turn”, an expression that might be understood as 7 See the documentation relating to Treason of Images held in the Barrie Kosky Collection at the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.

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referring to Kosky’s youth and experience (McKinnon 2020, p. 229). However, for others, more was at stake than Kosky’s age. The announcement of his appointment was immediately followed by a campaign to have him removed from office, led by Adelaide-based arts commentator Christopher Pearson. As the founder and editor of the monthly news and arts magazine, the Adelaide Review, Pearson was a spokesperson for a numerically very small, but culturally influential, Adelaide viewpoint that held that in order to beat off competition from Melbourne and Sydney, the Adelaide Festival needed “to be appealing to all taxpayers in Adelaide, and therefore slimmer, smaller, less ambitious, less challenging, and focused on entertainment” (Nicholl 1995). Pearson, sixteen years older than Kosky, voiced his concern in an ABC radio interview that “Kosky, because of his youth, because of his experience and perhaps his cultural and ethnic background won’t be able to deliver us the type of festival we need” (Nicholl 1995). Kosky’s “cultural and ethnic background” here presumably refers at least to his Jewishness. According to Pearson, “Barrie Kosky would be bringing us a young, gruelling, confronting, challenging festival programme almost at university revue level when what we really need is a festival that is above all entertaining and for everybody” (Nicholl 1995). This particular attack on Kosky was rather surprising, given that Christopher Hunt had not attracted similar vocal resistance, despite having gone on the record with his distrust of “populist” programming.8 Fears were fed by a conspiracy theory that emerged as rumours were reported that Kosky was secretly planning to bring the French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida to the festival and to stage Schoenberg’s atonal opera Moses und Aron. Ironically, when Kosky’s Festival Programme was eventually announced, the Adelaide Review complained that it did not include “a full-scale twentieth-century opera”, opining that it was “disappointing for a major public festival such as this, operating with significant public subsidy, to ignore this aspect of programming” (Crayford 1995). A public meeting including arts organisation representatives and academics was arranged at short notice in July 1994 to allow people to express concerns at Kosky’s appointment. The meeting saw calls for Kosky’s resignation, for mandatory government-appointed positions on the Festival board in order to set boundaries on the artistic director’s role, and for an avowedly populist approach to programming (Ward 1994), despite the fact that no items of the 1996 programme had been announced. Following the meeting, correspondence published in the Adelaide Review from Stephen Spence, the South Australian Branch Secretary of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (Australia’s largest union and industry advocate for professionals in the creative arts), argued that the Festival “must be accountable to the taxpayers of South Australia who fund it”, but only a minority of whom attend it. Spence (1994) also decried what he conceived of as elitist attitudes towards the

“[Hunt] is ‘not sure about the “strong community-based movement” of the South Australian Government [one of the festival’s main funders]. It is alarmingly reminiscent of some of the movements for community-based arts support in London in the 1960s that I look back on with absolute dread and which produced nothing of worth’” (Shmith 1992). 8

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Adelaide Festival that conceptualised Adelaide as the “Edinburgh of the South” (despite the Festival being initiated expressly on the model of the Edinburgh Festival). As an alternative to these allegedly elitists attitudes, Spence (1994) proposed that Melbourne’s Moomba Festival—a street-parade-style local festival—might be a model worth considering to replace Adelaide’s international arts festival. If we look beyond what appear to be ad hominem attacks and the almost hysterical tone of some discussions, it seems that a concept of art and community was at stake in some of these anti-Kosky arguments: that a state-funded arts festival should “be above all entertaining and for everybody” or at least for every Adelaidean or South Australian taxpayer. This conceptualisation seems to assume that there is a form of entertainment the enjoyment of which is universally shared, and that this is what a state-funded festival as a whole should provide. To give Pearson the benefit of the doubt, his reference to the possibility that Kosky’s cultural and ethnic background made him unsuited to the type of festival Adelaide needed might be interpreted as meaning that the festival required a director with an understanding of the common denominator of taste and entertainment if the festival were to provide something entertaining in which everyone could share, consistently and across its entirety. Such a director would require the qualifications and identity markers of an “average” person—and as a homosexual Jew, Kosky is clearly not an “average” person in a South Australian context. A similar set of assumptions about the link between identity markers and access to a “mainstream” understanding of art seems to lie behind the objection by Margot Osborne, one of the 1992 Festival’s visual arts curators, to Kosky’s proposed concept for the 1996 visual arts component as “an idiosyncratic perspective that originates in Kosky’s own postmodern, gendered, European, Melburnian Jewish consciousness” (Evans 1994). There are obvious flaws in this conceptualisation of identity, art and community—clearly even a street parade cannot be entertaining for everybody if that “everybody” is to include the agoraphobic—but I do want to take it seriously as an attempt to engage with the interrelationship of community, taste and art—art that in this case caters to a pre-existing, universalised community of taxpayers bound by a common denominator of taste in entertainment. To demand that a festival be “above all entertaining and for everybody” without specifying what exactly would meet this requirement is to risk accusations of bad faith, of assuming that what is entertaining and satisfying for the speaker is entertaining and satisfying for “everybody”. Pearson, who died in 2013, was a conservative cultural mentor of future prime minister Tony Abbott, and projected a carefully self-curated profile as a celibate homosexual, bon viveur and arbiter of good taste. During Kosky’s period in office at the Adelaide Festival, Pearson was moving closer to his subsequent conversion to Catholicism. After converting in 1999, he claimed that “when I converted, as an adherent of the Latin mass I became a member of a minority, as marginalised and persecuted as the first generation of out-and-proud gays” (Pearson 2009). As such, he himself might not be thought of as being in a position to judge what would appeal to “everybody”. Indeed, that homosexuals were unable to judge what would appeal to “everybody” or to produce work with such an

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appeal was a not uncommon belief among critics and audiences in Australia in the 1990s. For example, among the many letters of complaint about Kosky’s 1995 production of Verdi’s Nabucco for the Australian Opera published in The Sydney Morning Herald, that of operagoer Adriana Maxwell proposed With the fiasco that is Nabucco (as produced by the Australian Opera) perhaps now is the time to look closely at the company’s hierarchy and the complete lack of women in any position determining or influencing artistic direction. Long regarded in the arts community as “boys’ own world”, it is time that the AO presented more balanced new productions instead of these extravagant homoerotic fantasies—particularly when you consider the vast public funding (Sydney Morning Herald 1995).

In an extended, excoriating review of Kosky’s 1998 production of King Lear for Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company, Peter Craven (1998) referred to Lear as “a profoundly heterosexual play”, lamenting “that a director of Kosky’s talents should have no imaginative understanding of this” and linking Kosky’s alleged unsuitability to direct this central work of Anglophone theatre expressly to Kosky’s homosexuality. In the context of similar discussions in 1995 about the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts’ apparent failure to provide programming attractive to all taxpayers, Carrillo Gantner, a prominent Melbourne philanthropist and cultural leader, asked rhetorically on ABC Radio, “who knows, maybe one day they’ll have a heterosexual run the Melbourne Festival?” (Le Couteur 1995). Gantner thus implicitly outed the then current Artistic Director, Leo Schofield, who had recently separated from his wife, but who would not publicly out himself until 2015, in a Sydney Morning Herald interview (Dapin 2015).9 As discussed in more detail in Chap. 1, Kosky’s Jewishness, particularly his practice of staging Jewish-themed works from a Jewish perspective, was also seen by some as creating barriers to accessibility in works he had directed prior to his appointment to the Adelaide Festival. Comments such as “this Belshazzar is something of a hotch-potch. Doubtless the more one is informed about Jewish culture and practices the more the oddities acquire meaning” (O’Connell 1990); “[Kosky’s production of The Golem] runs the risk, indeed, with its panoply of Jewish reference, of excluding the ‘outsider’” (Carmody 1993); and “[The Wilderness Room] is rich in symbolism and historical references, but they are not necessarily symbols or references that non-Jews will appreciate” (Radic 1994) give a flavour of journalistic reviewers’ sense that the productions were not for them. Kosky’s homosexuality and Jewishness were thus part of a wider Australian arts discourse in the 1990s on either side of his Adelaide appointment around the accessibility to “mainstream” audiences of art produced by “minority” artists, the 9 The Melbourne International Festival of the Arts (now the Melbourne International Arts Festival) began life in 1986 as the Spoleto Festival Melbourne. At the time of these debates in 1995, all of its Artistic Directors—Gian Carlo Menotti (1986–1988), John Truscott (1989–1991), Richard Wherrett (1992–1993) and Leo Schofield (1994–1996)—had been either homosexual or bisexual men, although their status as such was not publicly known in every case during their period of appointment.

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ability of minority artists to engage with canonical and other works in ways acceptable to the self-appointed guardians of Australian taste, and even what it meant to receive, appreciate or enjoy a piece of theatre. Pearson’s doubts about Kosky’s suitability for the position of Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival on the grounds of his cultural and ethnic background can therefore be set in this context. However, it is important to clarify that while this discourse played itself out on highprofile platforms, it was remarkably restricted, and we should not assume that Pearson, journalistic critics, or theatregoers sufficiently disgruntled to write in to a newspaper represented Australian theatregoers or the wider Australian public. In fact, Gilgul’s productions were generally very well received by audiences, and although the reception of Kosky’s King Lear was notorious for descriptions of walk-outs, an attack on performers, outraged letters to newspapers and some excoriating reviews, it was in fact a popular hit, especially in Sydney where its Opera House run sold out.10 While audiences were in the main far less conservative and antagonistic to Kosky’s pre-Adelaide work than his vocal critics might suggest, Pearson’s attacks and reports of the July 1994 meeting ensured that Kosky’s appointment appeared both high-profile and controversial, and that Kosky as an individual was assumed to be responsible for the whole festival. Nonetheless, despite the antagonism to Kosky that manifested itself on his appointment, Kosky’s description of his approach to season planning shared common features with that of Pearson and fellow objectors, especially regarding the need for the festival to provide something for everybody. However, his conceptualisation of what “something for everybody” might mean differed from that of his detractors. When interviewed on radio, Kosky said, I believe [. . .] that there has to be at least one event in the Festival that anyone could go to. Now, you can’t predict what people are going to go [to]. Audiences are very strange, you know, specifically in the last few years, they’re not going to things. But it’s very difficult to predict what they will go to in the performing arts and music. Now, I think that when you open up an Adelaide Festival brochure if there’s not a minimum of one event—it could be a rock concert, it could be a dance performance, it could be something at Writers’ Week, it could be an exhibition, it could be a theatrical production from, you know, Africa—whether there’s not something—one thing in the Festival, then I think we’ve failed. But it is very difficult to say that, you know, I don’t like saying that there’s a mainstream and there’s edgy stuff and there’s this stuff and there’s this stuff—I tend to think, well, if it’s quality it’s quality, and if it hasn’t been seen before in Adelaide that’s very important, and if the work and the ideas in the work are good then that’s the criteria that we’re looking at . . . the ideal always is to bring in work that is new, or if it’s not new, then it hasn’t been seen before in Australia (Conlon 1995).

Whereas Pearson et al. wanted a Festival that as a whole would be entertaining for everybody, Kosky recognised that people differ in taste and interests. While Christopher Hunt framed his 1994 festival offerings in terms of community-building among audiences of artists and performers on one hand and of challenge and

10 For further details of high-profile negative reactions to Kosky’s otherwise successful King Lear, see Severn (2019), pp. 70-73.

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confrontation to inherently conservative non-artist audiences on another, Kosky aimed to provide a diverse festival programme from which everyone, regardless of mindset, taste or practical artistic background, would be able to find at least one thing that appealed. In contrast to marketing theory, however, Kosky did not claim to be able to predict what would appeal to anybody, but framed the idea of appeal in terms of an openness to the new. This sense of the new—whether completely new, new to Australia, new to Adelaide, or new to a potential audience member was reinforced in the show descriptions in the festival booking guide. A glance at some of these descriptions suggests an almost relentless emphasis on various forms of newness: •

• •

• • • •

• •

Commissioned by the Adelaide Festival, THE BLACK SEQUIN DRESS is the latest work from one of Australia’s truly original artists, Jenny Kemp. . . . This new production, which derives inspiration from the painting of surrealist artist Paul Delvaux, is about the extraordinary resonances of ordinary action. Lyrical, confronting and important new Australian theatre; For the first time in Australia and only at the Telstra Adelaide Festival 96—the explosive and electrifying energy of Israel’s leading contemporary dance company; Through a fearless and virtuosic dedication to experimentation, KRONOS QUARTET has established a striking mode of interpretation unmatched by its peers. Among the highlights of their concerts will be their musical version of Alan Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” and Tan Dun’s extraordinary “Ghost Opera”: both these works will be exclusive Australian premieres; First performance by OZOPERA, the Australian Opera’s new national touring company in the shell of the Queen’s Theatre (Australia’s oldest mainland theatre), 12 singers and 12 instrumentalists will perform a new version of Mozart’s glorious opera; For the first time in Australia, the Telstra Adelaide Festival 96 is proud to present PIERRE HENRY, one of the most innovative sound composers in the world; CLAUSTROPHOBIA is a complex form of new hopes, new phobias and new discoveries; INJE is a new production by Melbourne-based company HILDEGARD. It is being produced in collaboration with Vaskressia Viharova, one of Bulgaria’s most daring and innovative directors . . . INJE is an important work by one of Australia’s most exciting new theatre companies; From the mystical Turkish city of Konya comes one of the most mesmerising and graceful dance rituals in the world—twenty-nine dancers, singers and musicians, performing for the first time in Australia and only at the Telstra Adelaide Festival 96; In an exclusive Adelaide-only season, Lloyd Newson and his UK-based company DV8 Physical Theatre return to Australia with their latest electrifying production, ENTER ACHILLES (Adelaide Festival 1995).

I would argue that this is a key and consistent feature of Kosky’s approach to season planning and administration—in contrast to Christopher Hunt, who saw it as human nature to resist the new, Kosky treats people as open to the new, and, rather than catering to pre-existing communities, verified preferences or existing tastes, he sets up a diversity of works of art around which new communities of taste might congeal. This is not to claim a universality within communities of taste—one does not need to assume that the communities that form around a work of art, especially the multifaceted performing arts, are attracted by the same things, share the same

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viewpoints, or experience the enjoyment of a performance, or of being in community, in the same way. To take one example, prior to the festival programme’s release, it is highly unlikely that many focus groups would have suggested spontaneously that Turkish sufi whirling dervishes were just what they craved; nonetheless, the whirling dervishes were a hit, bringing together and creating temporary, fleeting moments of community among those with interests, for example, in dance, in Turkish music, in world music, in ethnomusicology, in costume, in gender, in sufism, in Islam or religion and mysticism in general, in Turkey or with Turkish heritage or connections, or just with an interest in trying something new to Adelaide. Kosky’s approach—that it is difficult to predict what audiences will go to— differs from that of Australian arts companies, such as Opera Australia, that are strongly driven by market research based on customers’ existing declared tastes— anyone who regularly buys Opera Australia tickets online is likely to have experienced survey fatigue.11 Not only are programmes driven by the existing tastes of current audiences, but potential ticket purchasers are encouraged to choose their next production on the basis of existing tastes. Examples from Opera Australia’s advertising for its 2021 season include: “See it if you like romantic stories, famous tunes, fireworks and Pretty Woman” [La Traviata]; “See it if you like historic epics like Ben Hur, awkward love triangles, spectacular costumes, screens on stage” [Aida]; “See it if you like adventure stories, thrilling ensemble singing, passionate choruses” [Ernani]; “See it if you like World War Two films with a good romance thrown in, breathtaking sets, dramatic stories with music to match” [Tosca] (Opera Australia 2021). Audiences are treated as risk-averse, as wary of the new, as needing to be guided towards buying tickets for a production they do not know on the basis of similarities to the tried and tested. This approach came to a peak when Opera Australia used as a source of marketing pride the fact that its 2016–2017 Sydney summer season contained no new productions, but only productions in revival that audiences already knew: “Opera Australia’s current Sydney Summer Season included all revivals, La Bohème (Gale Edwards), La Traviata (Elijah Moshinsky), King Roger (Kasper Holten), Tosca (John Bell) and Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (Damiano Michieletto). All revivals, and all presented by revival directors to great acclaim and accolades, and one of our most successful seasons to date” (Galvin 2017). Like Kosky’s festival, Opera Australia sets up works of art around which communities of taste might congeal. In the latter case, however, these works of art are framed not in terms of the new, but of an avoidance of the unknown. In contrast to Opera Australia’s express invocation of verified preferences—and specifically preferences in entertainment, with a resolute avoidance of suggestions that opera might be politically engaged or relevant to contemporary life—Kosky’s approach in 11

I have repeatedly been invited by e-mail by Opera Australia to complete a survey on the day after I have attended a performance. While questions vary, I have noticed a trend for framing “innovative” productions or musically more challenging operas in negative terms: after a performance of Kosky’s production of The Nose in 2018 I was asked whether I agreed that the production had put me off attending opera again.

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framing his festival offerings was generally to avoid invoking issues of taste or comparisons to other works or genres. Instead, he conjured up how audiences might feel in the course of an event: • •

• • • • •

•

•

Join these wonderful musicians [Bang on a Can All-Stars] in a staggering journey of contemporary music that will leave you breathless, invigorated and screaming for more! Australia’s acclaimed vocal ensemble THE SONG COMPANY will perform [Carlo Gesualdo’s “Tenebrae”] over three nights, following the original practice of progressively extinguishing candles. The increasing physical darkness along with the increasingly dark images in the text (dealing with the events surrounding Christ’s death) and the extraordinary music will provide festival audiences with a rare and unforgettable experience. For two explosive evenings, TITO PUENTE and his 14-piece LATIN JAZZ ENSEMBLE will leave you breathless, sweaty and delirious. The breathtaking technique and scintillating virtuosity of this duo [Begum Parveen Sultana and Ustad Dilshad Khan] leaves the audience spellbound and intoxicated. The awesome range and soaring power of [Yungchen Lhamo’s] unique version of Tibetan devotional singing is an overwhelmingly haunting experience. Seeing a performance by MOLECULAR THEATRE is like entering a surreal labyrinth populated by objects, people, fragmented language, ominous red windows and funnelfaced insects. From New York’s Carnegie Hall to London’s Royal Albert Hall, he performs to standing ovations from capacity audiences humming, swaying, hand-clapping and fingersnapping to their infectious beat. Proclaimed the undisputed King of Klezmer (“instrument of song”), FEIDMAN and his trio play Jewish music, Joplin rags, Gershwin’s songs and Argentinean tangos with an irresistible blend of art and showmanship. To attend a FEIDMAN performance is an extraordinary, unforgettable and deeply moving experience. In Adelaide, THE WHIRLING DERVISHES will introduce the phenomenon that has fascinated people for hundreds of years. Their performances outdoors—at night under the stars—will provide festival-goers with a respite from the hurly-burly of the festival as well as a glimpse of unforgettable beauty. Using a highly physical language, DV8 explodes the boundaries of contemporary dance. ENTER ACHILLES will leave you disturbed, amused, confronted and breathless (Adelaide Festival 1995).

There are of course issues of taste at stake here—not everyone will be attracted to an event that leaves them “sweaty”—but these are not directly related to existing tastes in art or entertainment. While the Adelaide Festival’s system of ticket-price concessions meant that there was a potential for its communities of taste to comprise a relatively wide demographic, the high price of Opera Australia tickets and the absence of reduced-price tickets for the unemployed means that their communities of taste are likely to be restricted to the affluent. In their provision of works of art around which communities of taste might congeal, Kosky and Opera Australia differ from the recommendations of the Australian National Opera Review (Commonwealth of Australia 2016), accepted by the Australian government in 2017 (Australian Government 2017). These recommendations see taste as stemming from membership of a demographic group: a work of art is put on for an existing community, rather than providing opportunities for temporary communities to emerge from apparently disparate demographic groups. The report frames opera companies’ existing subscription audiences—

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those able to pay for tickets for multiple productions some time in advance of the performance—as their ongoing core audiences (despite objections to this framing by some Australian opera companies) (Commonwealth of Australia 2016, p. 67). As a result of the review, the main Australian opera companies must report to the government on their initiatives to maintain and cater to existing subscription audiences as their ongoing core audiences (Commonwealth of Australia 2016, p. 68). The Review accepts that this subscription audience is largely elderly and relatively well-off, but sees this as “a significant opportunity”—engagement with them means that “over time, they might also form the core of a group with whom to engage around a potential bequests development programme. Such engagement and dedication is likely to bear fruit, not just in selling more seats at a higher value, but also in philanthropic engagement as well as bequests” (Commonwealth of Australia 2016, pp. 68–69). While the review recognises the need for diversity in audiences, it frames its recommendations relating to diversity not in terms of diversifying committed subscription audiences, but in terms of single-ticket sales for events designed to cater to the presumed tastes of particular minorities. Among other proposals, the Review recommends that in order to broaden the demographic for single ticket sales, opera companies “should identify diverse product offerings to attract different demographic groups” (Commonwealth of Australia 2016, p. 70). Here the review seems to understand taste as strongly related to membership of a demographic group, and appears either to expect opera companies to guess what this relationship between taste and demographic group might be, or else to develop the tools to find out. While Christopher Pearson and the Adelaide arts commentariat, Christopher Hunt, Barrie Kosky, Opera Australia, and the National Opera Review appear at odds with each other, they can at least be framed in the same discourse of community, art, taste and season planning. Discussion of the need to increase diversity is a frequent topic in the Australian arts—the Australia Council has recently announced that enhanced diversity on and off stage should be a requirement of government support for the major performing arts companies. I would argue that the effectiveness of initiatives to increase diversity depends on a clear understanding of the interactions of community, art, taste and season planning. We therefore appear to have at least five approaches to the performing arts, community, and season planning in Australia. The first, exemplified by Christopher Pearson and his Adelaide followers, is that there is a form of entertainment that is shared by “everybody”, or at least all taxpayers, and that a government-funded arts season should appeal in its entirety to all taxpayers, and do so on the level of that entertainment. The target audience is an already existing community of taxpayers. A season planner should understand and ideally share “mainstream” taste, and preferably not exhibit minority identities. The second, exemplified by Christopher Hunt, is that the ideal audience for art works is a community of artists. Other audiences need to be jolted from their conservative complacency by these works of art. The third, exemplified by Barrie Kosky, is that audiences are open to the new, and the role of season planning is to provide a range of new things, from which

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“everybody” will be able to find at least one thing that appeals. The target audience for the season is the local population plus interested outsiders, and attendance at an individual work of art itself creates a temporary community of taste. Tastes differ among individuals, and are not strongly related to demographic groups. A work of art need not appeal in the same way to all those to whom it appeals. A season planner needs to know what is currently available, have wide-ranging tastes, be a judge of quality, and know what is new to the place where the season will be performed. The fourth, exemplified by Opera Australia, is that audiences are inherently conservative and risk-averse in their artistic choices, and need to be guided to similar offerings. The role of a season planner is to be aware of the revealed tastes of existing audiences through marketing surveys and/or focus groups, to treat existing audiences as the model for future audiences, and not to deviate far from these audiences’ taste in season offerings. Attendance at an individual work of art itself creates a temporary community of taste, but while tastes differ among individuals, and are not strongly related to demographic groups, pricing issues restrict the range of those able to participate in these communities. The fifth, exemplified by the National Opera Review, is that state-subsidised performing arts are product offerings that should be diversified and marketed to different demographic groups with the aim of expanding one-off ticket sales. There is an assumed link between tastes and demographic groups. Season planners need to know the tastes of elderly and affluent ongoing subscription audiences and also know the tastes of diverse demographic groups and market accordingly. Attendance at specialised offerings is a function of belonging to a community, rather than an opportunity to create a new, temporary community. None of these is of course entirely correct. As the initiatives (discussed in Chap. 1) on reducing barriers to access that the Komische Oper Berlin has implemented under Kosky’s leadership show, there are sometimes significant obstacles to participating in a community of taste that do not relate directly to attitudes to an artwork itself. Further, some potential audience members are inherently riskaverse, some naturally crave the new. Not all art events will produce a sense of temporary community; at those that do, not everyone present will experience it. Nonetheless, Kosky’s approach is attractive and valuable both artistically and socially: moments of temporary community centred on a shared experience of the new are moments of rupture in the everyday that open up possibilities of change, of social reconfiguration. Indeed, as the Komische Oper under Kosky has demonstrated, it is possible to recognise that a surface risk-averseness can be overcome to release an underlying openness to the new. Its short so-called pop-up-opera videos disseminated on social media are one example of this. In these, scenes from an opera irrupt in unexpected places—a boxing gym, an airport waiting lounge, a bar, a market—performed by members of an opera’s cast and a small band. Not only do these viral videos allow potential audience members to hear how an opera might sound, and in contexts with which they are familiar, but they also strategically include images of surprised “ordinary” bystanders, whose facial expressions and body language move from wary and hostile at the outset to engrossed, included and excited by the end. To

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treat audience members as open to the new is thus not necessarily naïve, but requires initiatives to release this openness. We might therefore see Kosky’s attitude to audiences and the new in his season planning in the 1996 Adelaide Festival as a forerunner to his work at the Komische Oper Berlin, where time, resources, and an ongoing contract provided him with the tools and motivation to engage with art and community-building in ways that might serve as models for Australian companies.

References Adelaide Festival. (1989). Adelaide Festival 1990: Booking Guide. Adelaide: Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Festival. (1991). Adelaide Festival 1992: Booking Guide. Adelaide: Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Festival. (1993). Adelaide Festival 1994: Booking Guide. Adelaide: Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Festival. (1995). Telstra Adelaide Festival 96: Booking Guide. Adelaide: Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Festival. (2010). History of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Adelaide: Adelaide Festival. Australia Council for the Arts. (2018). International Arts Tourism: Connecting Cultures. Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts. Australian Government. (2017). Response to the National Opera review final report. Canberra: Australian Government. Bramwell, M.. (1995). And There’s More. Adelaide Review, December. Broinowksi, A. (1994). Can We Be Part of Asia? Only if Asia Wants Us To Be. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March. Carmody, J. (1993). Soul-Shaking Opus of Optimism. Sun Herald, 17 October. Cochrane, P. (1994). Brave New World At the Adelaide Festival. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February. Commonwealth of Australia. (2016). National Opera Review: Final Report. Canberra: Department of Communications and the Arts. Conlon, K. (1995). Interview with Barrie Kosky, ABC Radio 5AN Adelaide, broadcast 3 February. Recording held in the State Library of South Australia’s Christopher Pearson Project archives, reference PRG1224/12/32. Craven, P. (1998). Kinky Lear. Eureka Street, October. Crayford, P. (1995). Cultural Tourism and the Demtel Kid. Adelaide Review, November. Dapin, M. (2015). Mr Sydney Picks Up the Baroque Pieces. Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April. Evans, B. (1993). Adelaide Festivals Share a Stage in Pledge of Excellence. Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November. Evans, B. (1994). Adelaide Gets its Act Together. Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October. Gallasch, K. (1995). Celebrating the Site. Real Time, 6. Galvin, N. (2017). “We cannot guarantee the work’s integrity”: attack on Opera Australia’s new Carmen. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March. Hunter, M. A. (2004). Utopia, Maps and Ecstasy: Configuring Space in Barrie Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival. Australasian Drama Studies, 44, 36–51. Le Couteur, G. (1995). Why Do We Have Festivals?. The Age, 20 October. McKinnon, C. (Ed.). (2020). Adelaide Festival: 60 Years 1960–2020. Mile End, SA: Wakefield Press. Morley, M. (1996). No Mere Spectacles. Australian Financial Review, 29 March. Nicholl, M. (1995). Drive Time. ABC Radio 5AN Adelaide. Recording of broadcast, dated only “1995”, held in the State Library of South Australia’s Christopher Pearson Project archives, reference PRG1224/12/4. O’Connell, C. (1990). Musical Briskness and Passion amid Fog. The Age, 3 August.

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Opera Australia. (2021). Season Guide. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://opera.org.au/ season-guide/. Pearson, C. (2009). No regrets about act of faith despite Church’s Woeful State. The Australian, 5 September. Radic, L. (1994). Jewish experience lost in symbolism. The Age, 2 December. Severn, J. R. (2019). Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical. Abingdon: Routledge. Shmith, M. (1992). Festival Phoenix. Sydney Morning Herald, 14 July. Shmith, M. (1993a). The Outsider at Adelaide. The Age, 7 June. Shmith, M. (1993b). Slimmer, But More Dense. The Age, 13 November. Song, K. B. (1994). Critics Slam Adelaide’s Asian Shift. Straits Times, 5 March. Spence, S. (1994). And Furthermore. Adelaide Review, August. Sydney Morning Herald. (1995). Shock! It’s Nabucco. Letters. Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September. Ward, P. (1994). A windy evening in Adelaide. Adelaide Review, July.

John R. Severn is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, collaborating on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the economic and cultural value of theatre in Australia. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical (Routledge 2019) and co-editor with Ulrike Garde of Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (Routledge 2021). From 2017–2020 he was a Macquarie University Research Fellow with the project “Beyond Cultural Borders: Barrie Kosky’s Rethinking of Community in Artistic and Practical Terms”. His wider research focuses on the intersections of Shakespeare, adaptation, community, and opera and various forms of musical theatre.

Chapter 5

Dramaturgies of Repetition and the Denial of Catharsis: Traumatic Breaking Points in Barrie Kosky’s Approach to Character Charlotte Farrell

Abstract This chapter examines select theatrical productions directed by Barrie Kosky performed in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s. Specifically, the chapter analyses Kosky’s use of repetition in scenes from King Lear (1998), The Lost Echo (2006), and The Women of Troy (2008). These analyses reveal that Kosky staged characters’ encounters with trauma using dramaturgies of repetition that ultimately denied catharsis to the character and, by extension, the audience. This chapter considers the relationship between Kosky’s use of repetition, his staging of characters’ encounters with trauma, and the subsequent denial of catharsis in specific scenes. In doing so, it accounts for a central dramaturgical mechanism in Kosky’s Australian theatre productions—repetition—and its impact.

Imagine a scene on an expansive proscenium stage. The blind prophet, Teiresias, sits on an ornate chaise longue illuminated by a spotlight. He recounts in vivid detail the astonishing myth of Phaeton. Phaeton was the son of Phoebus the sun god, who borrowed his father’s chariot and lost control of the reins. Terrified, he drove the chariot into the sun, subsequently burning the earth to a crisp. At the conclusion of the monologue, Teiresias sings Noel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy”. Doll-like figures wearing protruding dildoes emerge onto the stage, their petite bodies dwarfed by gigantic shadows of themselves that scale up the walls of the theatre. The group of human-dolls periodically scream and convulse as Teiresias continues to sing. This scene occurred at the beginning of Barrie Kosky’s The Lost Echo performed at Sydney Theatre Company in 2006, with John Gaden as Teiresias. The scene reveals a core tension between the narrative of Ovid’s Metamorphoses upon which the production was based (in a translation by Tom Wright), and Kosky’s auteur approach to mise-en-scène. Teiresias’ monologue was in step with dramatic convention, yet the introduction of the music challenged the stability of his character and the convulsing, screaming figures interrupted the audience’s emotional identification with the story. This interruption was not an example of Brechtian

C. Farrell (*) Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_5

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Verfremdungseffekt, but rather reveals the director’s interest in highly theatrical mechanisms for the presentation and questioning of character.1 Kosky both engaged with and challenged theatrical convention in his approach to character in specific Australian productions and in some ways the Phaeton scene exemplified this, especially through the human-dolls’ repeated screams. Specifically, as will be the focus of this chapter, when characters recounted traumatic experiences Kosky engaged dramaturgies of repetition. These repetitions were moments in a scene where bodily gestures, words, music, or sounds were repeated in close succession. As glimpsed through this brief sketch of the Phaeton scene, Kosky staged characters in the throes of traumatic experience/memory/recollection while performing excessively repeated gestures, actions, words, musical refrains, and/or sounds. It can be said therefore that Kosky’s repetitions occurred in moments that were psychodramatically confluent with a character’s traumatic experience within the narrative at the same time as somewhat loosening the strictures of character as a dramatic concept. What I mean by this is that repetition at once destabilised character as a theatrical concept by in some ways exhausting what it referenced, yet the repetition also operated to make that character’s trauma in the narrative intensely felt. The co-existence of these presumably irreconcilable theatrical forces held together in contrast—character and its transgression through repetition—in large part undergird the impact of the scenes examined in this chapter, where we see a dynamic dance between representational narrative theatre and its abstraction. An exploration of key scenes from The Lost Echo, Women of Troy (2008), and King Lear (1998) in this chapter leads me to question how characters’ trauma in the plays were affectively enacted through dramaturgical repetition on Kosky’s stage, where theatrical convention (dramatic character) co-existed with abstract elements (repetition). In pursuing this line of enquiry I will examine the relationship between trauma and repetition in Kosky’s aforementioned productions to consider how these aspects relate to the director’s approach to character, and why catharsis may have been denied for both the character and the audience as a result. These considerations I suggest are fundamental to an engagement with the aesthetic and thematic dimensions of Kosky’s Australian theatrical productions, where repetition was one dramaturgical strategy that informed his distinctive directorial approach.

1

It can be said that aspects of Kosky’s early work in Australia were inspired by Brecht. Yoni Prior and Alison Richards, for example, write that Kosky’s work with Gilgul Theatre Company in the 1990s employed “a style that owed a clear debt to the Brechtian heritage” (2002, p. 34).

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Catharsis, Trauma, Repetition Aristotle famously failed to define catharsis. In my discussion of catharsis in this chapter I adopt the conventional understanding of Aristotelian catharsis as a purging of emotions.2 Indeed, Kosky has often pushed and challenged the physical endurance of his actors and audiences in ways that have inspired intense responses to his work that could be considered to toy with the language of catharsis. In the case of The Lost Echo, for example, Australian theatre critic John McCallum (2010) recounts, that “at each of the three intervals [. . .] I walked out physically stunned, dissociated from my sense of myself”. Similarly, McCallum described Kosky’s Women of Troy as “one of the most harrowing nights in the theatre I have ever spent”. I would suggest that the director’s engagement with traumatic narratives using repetition contributed significantly to their impact. Whether this impact was cathartic, or whether Kosky’s use of repetition ultimately denied the possibility for an emotional catharsis for the audience, is a question I would like to take up. Indeed, there is a clear link between catharsis, trauma, and repetition that becomes relevant here. In psychoanalysis, by recounting traumatic events in a therapist’s office the patient ultimately achieves a catharsis of painful emotions.3 Likewise, in the theatre, audiences may purge their own emotions through bearing witness to a character’s tragic downfall. While scholars such as F. L. Lucas have contested this version of catharsis, famously writing that “the theatre is not a hospital” (1957, p. 29), what becomes more challenging for a discussion of Kosky’s work is that these interpretations are predicated upon a mimetic transaction between spectator and character.4 In the context of Kosky’s work, this mimetic formula is complicated in many ways. For one, the presumption that a character would represent their trauma in a cohesive enough fashion that would enable an emotional identification to occur in the first place becomes problematised. Kosky’s complexification of mimetic, emotional identification between spectator and stage is performatively enacted, in part, through his use of repetition. It is of interest, then, that trauma is fundamentally marked by representational excess and repetition. As Peggy Phelan famously wrote, trauma cannot be represented; it “makes a tear in the symbolic network itself” (1997, p. 5). In her work on the subject, Jill Bennett (2005, p. 23) traces the irreconcilability of trauma and representation back to Pierre Janet, and Bessel van der Kolk after him; all contend that trauma directly implicates the body and therefore operates “outside verbal-semantic-linguistic representation”. This notion of trauma’s

2

Catharsis and ancient tragedy have been the subject of extended discussion. See for example (Hume 1757; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988; Lear 1988; Ford 1995; Golden 1962, 1969, 1973, 1976). See also (Munteanu 2012) for an extended discussion of the literature and discourse on tragic pathos. 3 For a discussion of theatre, catharsis and psychoanalysis see Scheff (1979). 4 On the relationship between catharsis and mimesis in Aristotle, see Halliwell (1986); in particular pp. 109–137 and 168–201.

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unrepresentability and its emphasis on corporeality has been brought into relief by some contemporary theatre work and critical engagements with these performances that are not strictly “representational”. Carol Martin’s influential book Theatre of the Real (2013), for example, accounts for performances such as some verbatim theatre that introduce survivor testimony as part of the dialogue, as well as other instances where real-world traumatic experiences are woven into performance.5 Contributions to the discourse at the intersection of trauma studies and performance studies in particular have questioned how traumatic experience is represented in performance. Indeed, the performance of trauma and the trauma of performance has been a fertile nexus point of analysis for scholars since trauma studies was more formally established in the 1990s. Bryoni Trezise and Caroline Wake highlight that the “reversed and reciprocal gaze” of trauma studies and performance studies share common themes of repetition, recollection, and witnessing (2013, p. 13). Others have explored the inherent performativity of trauma in the ways in which it demands an audience to bear witness to testimony, and how it can be continually reenacted through symptoms such as flashbacks, as well as “other repeating symptoms. . . includ[ing] wordless and affectless states” (Little 2015, p. 45). Phelan and others’ claims about the unrepresentability of trauma have therefore found limits in light of some contemporary performance and the lively emerging critical discourse at the intersection of trauma and performance studies. Some scholars have contested trauma’s supposed “unrepresentability” as a result, instead arguing that performance is indeed an ideal site for explorations of traumatic experience. Central to these arguments is that a more expansive notion of representation must be engaged in order to move beyond automatically collapsing it with linear narrative theatre. Patrick Duggan in particular has deftly argued that examples of effective engagements with trauma in performance enact a “shimmering” between reality and representation (2012, p. 74) and that this glittering, mimetic collapse between the theatrical and the real “creates an unease which is cognate with the experience of traumatic reoccurrence” (p. 64). Likewise, Suzanne Little has shown that theatre’s attempt to represent trauma can fail by trying to “recreate” the traumatic event through “emotional-filled reenactments” and that performances are more successful when they “facilitate the eruption of the flesh of traumatic experience through other dramaturgical forms of repetition” (2015, p. 47). In this undeniably Artaudian flourish, repetition, for Little, becomes central to the effective and affective communication of the “non-closure and displacement” of trauma in performance. While questions surrounding the ethics of representing trauma onstage tend to dominate the trauma/performance studies discourse, commentators such as Little have demonstrated an interest in the repetitive nature of trauma and how repetition in performance may be employed as a more abstract, but perhaps more affectively resonant, theatrical double of trauma “in the world”. This move away from

5 In addition to Phelan and Martin, other notable contributions to discussions of staging real trauma in contemporary performance include Duggan (2012); Trezise (2012); and Haughton (2018).

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representational performance, without a neglect of the ways in which trauma is represented in various forms of performance, is critical to a discussion of Kosky’s Australian theatrical productions examined in this chapter. In these, indeed, we see a “making flesh” of traumatic experience through his dramaturgies of repetition.6 Taking specific scenes from The Lost Echo, Women of Troy, and King Lear as examples, following Duggan and Little I would like to explore how Kosky’s productions enacted a representational shimmering that can be said to have in some ways theatrically embodied traumatic experience, making it flesh. Crucially, Kosky achieved this not by didactically re-enacting or presenting traumatic events, but through repetition. The audience instead bore witness to characters in the throes of traumatic encounter or recollection, at the same time as character as a dramatic concept entered into ontological paroxysms. I would suggest that this use of repetition and the subsequent rupture in character as a concept was key to denying catharsis for the audience. It follows that repetition becomes a way for Kosky to both articulate a character’s trauma and fracture character as a dramatic category, which makes an emotional catharsis, in the conventional sense, impossible for both the character and the audience. As certain contributions to trauma studies have taught us, trauma is continually reactivated and as a result can never be fully expelled from the subject (Caruth 1995). Trauma is perpetually reanimated—it repeats—by coming into contact with different triggers in the world, which is why some scholars have contested the term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, arguing that it is never really past but relived as real and ongoing in the present.7 Kosky’s use of repetition in performance representationally enacts the “non-closure” of traumatic experience by denying catharsis to characters in moments where dramaturgical aspects—actions, words, sounds— ceaselessly loop. By extension, catharsis is also denied to the audience because emotional identification is no longer possible within these dramaturgies of repetition. While I am in no way suggesting that Kosky attempted to represent real trauma on stage, though that could perhaps be said for other contemporary theatre makers such as Romeo Castellucci, Jan Fabre, and Einar Schleef, what I posit instead is that through his approach to character using repetition, their traumatic experiences in the narrative were affectively enacted in ways that closely mirrored the excess of traumatic affect, which it can be said is more than a solely “representational” performance could ever hope to achieve.

6 Of course, the ethics of representing trauma and pain on stage is a recurring point of discussion in the literature, though it is not the primary concern to me here. For a selection of responses to this line of enquiry, see the chapters collected in Trezise and Wake (2013). 7 Drawing on the significant work of Cathy Caruth (1996, p. 11) who theorizes that an original traumatic event can never be fully experienced in the moment, but rather recurs through delayed returns such as nightmares, Duggan writes: “to use the word ‘post’ in this context is to deny the very present-ness of traumatic hallucination”. Therefore, he concludes, “trauma is thus a perpetually present absence; while the original event is an historical absence, the survivor-sufferer lives under the force of its continual re-performance” (2012, p. 23).

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In their edited collection on the subject, Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson write that traumatic affect is: The mode, substance and dynamics of relation through which trauma is experienced, transmitted, conveyed and represented. Traumatic affect crosses boundaries between personal and political, text and body, screen and audience, philosophy and culture. It is not a prescriptive and contained concept, but an open one. Rather than narrowing the meaning of its constitutive terms, traumatic affect brings them into relation in dynamic and surprising ways, sometimes discovering spaces in between that refuse to conform to either (2013, p. 12).

Kosky’s productions can be said to have harnessed the inherent excess of traumatic affect through repetition. This, in turn, stymied emotional catharsis and instead created the conditions for a different type of spectatorial encounter. We see a key example of this in the Myrrha scene from The Lost Echo, where the interstices between text and body, audience and stage, became overfull with traumatic affect through Kosky’s particular approach to staging character.

The Lost Echo The Lost Echo ran for eight hours. The production was divided into four acts and two parts that could be seen over two evenings, or, in selected performances, consecutively on the same day. The Lost Echo was comprised of a series of scenes based on various stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and an entire staging of Euripides’ Bacchae in the third act. The production was highly imagistic and imaginative. Stunning visual tableaux intersected with spirited contemporary and classical music performed by the cast, accompanied live by Kosky on piano. Some scenes included confronting stage imagery and sexually provocative acts and innuendo, while others were overwhelming in their choreographic sophistication and scale. At times, all thirty-five cast members sang and danced in unison in elaborate costumes. Scenes such as these were always accompanied by more sinister or comic aspects. Such contrasts created considerable tension throughout the production. In Part One, Act Two of The Lost Echo, Myrrha (Hayley McElhinney) described through monologue her lustful obsession with her own father. She performed the monologue centre stage under a spotlight, wearing a black silk evening gown. She lasciviously recounted having sex with her father night after night after night with the light off, concealing her identity. After describing this, in a moment of climax, Myrrha removed a pair of underwear from beneath her dress, as she squatted above the chair that she sat upon centre stage. After removing the first pair, she continued to remove brightly coloured underwear, one after another after another. This action recalled a sexualized version of a clown’s handkerchief trick, where an endless chain of different coloured hankies mysteriously appear connected to one another. It seemed like Myrrha’s action would never end, and she became increasingly frenzied as she slid off each pair of underwear.

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At first, the audience laughed hesitantly. Then they laughed harder. Yet as Myrrha continued to remove many more pairs of underwear, the audience’s laughter tapered off. The comic element of the work wore thin through the action being repeated. The repetition had both a comic effect and exacerbated the sinister content of the scene’s reference to incest, and Myrrha’s trauma. Further to this, the dramatic convention of Myrrha’s monologue and the construction of her character became frayed through the repetition, while also articulating her trauma. The repetition of her removing her underwear therefore both exacerbated and exceeded what Myrrha’s action represented in the narrative (having sex with her father) and there was a subsequent rupture in the scene’s verisimilitude—particularly the performance of Myrrha’s character—as a result. Although Myrrha’s lust for her father was at first delightfully conveyed, she became stuck in the replay of traumatic memory embodied through the repetition of her removing her underwear and her increasing frenzy. She was replaying or returning to the original site of the traumatic event where after several nights of sex, her father discovered her identity and tried to kill her. Thankfully, the gods took pity on her and transformed her into a tree. Myrrha’s repeated action in the context of recounting this made the representational stability of her character quiver, where she momentarily recalled more a sexualized circus clown than a mythological figure. The repeated action, however, also did articulate her trauma, especially by virtue of the fact that she become increasingly frenzied. In this respect, Kosky’s use of repetition through McElhinney’s performance was at once meaningless as the action did not move the plot forward, at the same time as the repetition embodied the excess of traumatic affect. Towards the end of the Myrrha scene, a previously concealed glass box on stage was revealed to be housing a group of actors dressed as terrifying clowns. They sang Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” while masturbating their huge prosthetic penises. Myrrha as orgasmic “clown” of the handkerchief/underwear trick was monstrously embodied across the literal clowns that appeared onstage. At the true climax of the scene, the clowns spurted blood from their phalluses all over the glass. While it could be said that the clowns quite literally expelled the blood that genetically connected Myrrha and her father, representational mimesis had been too violently punctured through the repetition earlier in the scene to effect such a heavy-handed interpretation. It can be said that this excess-effect, and excess of affect, draws comparisons with trauma.8 As Jill Bennett writes, trauma’s “unfamiliar or extraordinary nature renders it unintelligible, causing cognitive systems to balk; its sensory and affective character renders it inimical to thought” (2005, p. 23). What the repetition and the introduction of the clowns achieved was a contrast with, and subsequent intensification of, Myrrha’s trauma that ultimately denied her catharsis: the clowns ejaculated blood and invoked Cole Porter in a glorious lamentation, while she waddled about the stage, deranged, the underwear between her legs restricting

8 This connection between trauma and affect is discussed at length by scholars in Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson’s edited collection Traumatic Affect (2013).

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her movement. As such, the scene was ultimately cognitively “unintelligible”. It excessively implicated the bodies of the actors at the edge of their significatory selves as characters by staging Myrrha’s trauma using repetition and the introduction of the masturbating clowns. Emotional catharsis was therefore denied for both Myrrha as a character, and, by extension, the audience in the scene. It could be said that, as John McCallum and Tom Hillard (2010, p. 132) write in their article on The Lost Echo, “the visceral shock that this creates in the theatre is not an Aristotelian catharsis of pity and terror but more a Meyerholdian, even Artaudian, catharsis of psychic trauma and bodily emissions [. . .]”. How could Myrrha’s repeated act at once transgress the bounds of representational cohesion and make the sheer excess of traumatic experience felt, all the while denying emotional catharsis? In approaching this question, it is helpful to distinguish Kosky’s approach from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of repetition in postdramatic theatre. While the Myrrha scene may have drawn some comparisons with postdramatic theatre, ultimately Kosky’s use of repetition had a different function.

Character and Postdramatic Theatre: Irruptions and Divergences Postdramatic theatre, writes Lehmann, is “no longer oriented towards the psychological unfolding of action and character” (2006, p. 134) and in this way is distinctly anti-Aristotelian. Lehmann notes that repetition is central to postdramatic theatre’s move away from drama’s “psychological unfolding”, writing that “hardly any other procedure is as typical for postdramatic theatre as repetition” (2006, p. 156). The Myrrha scene from The Lost Echo, however, shows at once the unfolding of action and development of character at the same time as that character unravels through repetition. We see that the psychological unfolding of Myrrha’s character in her monologue was crucially related to the repetition. The repeated removal of her underwear seemed in excess of representationally “acting out” the sex with her father, and yet it emanated the traumatic affect of what it represented. While noting that “purposefully employed repetition” is the foundation of all aesthetic forms, Lehmann observes that in postdramatic theatre, repetition is primarily employed for deconstructive purposes (2006, p. 157).9 He writes: If processes are repeated to such an extent that they can no longer be experienced as part of a scenic architecture and structure of organization, the overtaxed recipient experiences them as meaningless and redundant, as a seemingly unending, unsynthesizable, uncontrolled and uncontrollable course of events. We experience the monotonous noise of a surge of signifiers

9 Lehmann lists Tadeusz Kantor, William Forsyth, Heiner Goebbels and Erich Wonder as postdramatic theatre-makers for whom repetition is a primary modality (2006, p. 156).

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that have been drained of their communicative character and can no longer be grasped as a part of a poetic, scenic, or musical totality of a work [. . .].

Did the audience experience the repetition in the Myrrha scene as redundant; a monotonous, meaningless noise? Was the spectator denied catharsis because they were “overtaxed”? While Lehmann contends that repetition in postdramatic theatre results in structured experience becoming drained of meaning, I would suggest that in the Myrrha scene, repetition somewhat deconstructed character as a dramatic concept but also used that very construct as kindling that ignited the repetition of her removing her underwear, affectively embodying her trauma. As a result, there was an intensification of significance as the same time as there was the emergence of something in excess of what the scene represented narratively: traumatic affect. To demonstrate my point, take, for instance, the jump-rope scene from Jan Fabre’s momentous twenty-four-hour production Mount Olympus as an example of repetition in postdramatic theatre. It contrasts with the Myrrha scene in critical ways. Mount Olympus was comprised of various scenes that loosely responded to aspects of Greek tragedy and mythology, yet it was far from an example of textbased narrative theatre.10 The jump-rope scene occurred several hours into the production. In the scene, actors performed a call-and-response with their leader while jumping rope (which was actually heavy chains) for an extremely long time. The actors stood in a v shape, with the leader at the apex. There were no characters as such, nor a discernible narrative; just the shirtless actors jumping rope and shouting the call-and-response refrain. As the scene continued, seemingly unendingly, the actors jumped up and down repeating the dialogue. They became sweaty and visibly exhausted from the repetitive movement and loud vocalisation. Some actors got tangled in the chains because they skipped a beat, their bodies unable to maintain the choreography that demanded a precise, militaristic synchrony perfectly timed with the movement of the other actors. They all became breathless from the sheer physical endurance that was required, while the audience also had to physically endure the excruciatingly loud slapping of the chains repeatedly hitting the stage floor.11 In comparison, in the Myrrha scene, there was a doubling of the original site of the trauma in the narrative and its after-effects and affects through the repetition in the performance. I am not suggesting that the Myrrha scene in anyway articulated the immense trauma of incest survivors, or that this was Kosky’s intention. Rather, in contrast to postdramatic theatre’s use of repetition—an example of which we see in the jump-rope scene from Fabre’s Mount Olympus—Kosky staged Myrrha’s story employing the “double” of both narrative representation and its deconstruction. While the repetition may have seemed like a gratuitous abstraction in The Lost Echo, it instead was integral to articulating Myrrha’s trauma in the narrative. If catharsis is the purging of emotions, Myrrha was, instead, momentarily purged of

Emma Cole (2020) describes Mount Olympus as an example of what she calls “postdramatic tragedy”. For her extended discussion of the performance, see pp. 245–274. 11 This could be described in terms of what Jenny Schrödl (2012) calls “acoustic violence” in her discussion of contemporary German theatre. 10

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selfhood, which draws comparisons with trauma and its capacity to render one’s sense of self inert. As Anna Gibbs writes, “Trauma involves a shattering of the self” (2013, p. 131), and Patrick Duggan contends that traumatic events “persist in a cyclical, ritual repetition which perpetuates a disruption of linear time, memory and consequently, notions of selfhood” (2012, p. 27).12 The audience could not emotionally identify with Myrrha’s character and therefore were denied catharsis. If we accept that catharsis is predicated upon a mimetic relationship between spectator and stage, there were immense limits placed upon the possibility for the spectator to emotionally identify with Myrrha. Indeed, this relationship was ruptured through McElhinney’s repeated action and stylised performance. Like Teiresias’ monologue described at the outset of this chapter, Myrrha’s monologue, too, was preliminarily performed in a dramatically conventional way. The Myrrha scene established itself representationally before using repetition to rupture the very framework it had established in the first place. This, I suggest, denied catharsis to Myrrha the character but also to the audience as a result, which is vastly different from Lehmann’s discussion of repetition in postdramatic theatre, exemplified through the Mount Olympus jump-rope scene. In the latter, there were no characters or dramatic narrative arc made available to transgress. It follows that the communicative character of the work was not drained of meaning in Myrrha’s repetition, though it did become strained by it. To expand on this, I turn to Kosky’s dynamic use of repetition and the subsequent denial of catharsis in his The Women of Troy. Rather than repeated physical movement in the Myrrha scene from The Lost Echo, the repetition took a different form through the musical score and sound design. However, the repetition did demand physical intensity from the actors, too.

The Women of Troy In contrast to the eight-hour running time of The Lost Echo, Kosky’s 2008 The Women of Troy ran for eighty minutes without an interval. Regardless of the differences in their running times, in both productions repetition was one performance aspect that challenged a strictly representational theatrical framework, which contributed to Kosky’s distinctive approach to staging character. Again, it also contributed to the denial of catharsis, where a type of desubjectification of character occurred, this time through the introduction of real elements that concatenated with theatrical aspects.

Duggan continues: “Trauma is a disruption of the self, of self-composure; it is a perpetual disruption of personal time which questions understandings of self because it recurs without anticipation continually to call into question our comprehension of the world and our movements through it” (2012, p. 27).

12

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Like The Lost Echo, the text for Kosky’s 2008 Women of Troy at Sydney Theatre Company was adapted by Wright, who also adapted the script for King Lear.13 The script for Women of Troy was brutally pared back and poetically eloquent. The performance of it was representationally and sensorially violent. It used extratextual performance elements to make allusion to torture camps at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. For example, for her first appearance on stage, Hecuba, played by Australian theatre luminary Robyn Nevin, was wheeled on by a masked guard. Hecuba wore long robes with a black hood covering her head. A large tiara was set on top of the hood. Hecuba was thus figured as both the queen from the classical story and a hooded and robed contemporary victim of abuse with parallels to an infamous photograph that emerged in 2004 of a hooded and robed victim of torture by the American military in Abu Ghraib. All the while, muffled sounds of modernity formed an aural backdrop to the scene: a television blared in the near distance, and the bureaucratic drawl of a telephone rang incessantly. The world of the aftermath of the Trojan War and the contemporary world were thus simultaneously present for the audience. The guard first stripped Hecuba of her robes, and then the tiara, stuffing Hecuba’s belongings in plastic bags, and finally removed the hood. When the hood and tiara were eventually removed, Hecuba was revealed to be bloody and bruised. The chorus similarly entered with black hoods covering their heads, stripped down to their underwear, bloody and covered in bruises. They stood precariously on cardboard boxes with wires tired around their ankles, again inviting the audience to draw parallels with the horrific images of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. One might argue that Kosky’s simultaneous presentation of two forms of historical time—ancient and contemporary—is an example of his creative fidelity to his sources: a modern-day reflection of Euripides’ desire for his audiences to receive The Trojan Women as simultaneously about the aftermath of the Trojan War and about the recent slaughter by the Athenians of all the adult male Melians following the siege of Melos the year before The Trojan Women was first performed. In Euripides’ play, after the mighty fall of Troy that Hecuba, Cassandra, and Helen recount through monologues, all the women are designated a particular man to whom they will be enslaved. Hecuba is made the property of Odysseus. In Kosky’s production, this was coldly announced by a disembodied Talthybius through a loudspeaker suspended above the audience’s heads.14 Loud gunshots boomed in the space. These gunshots had already been heard throughout the performance, blasting in the close distance. Some blasts seemed to come from beneath the raked seating of the auditorium, physically rattling the audience in their chairs. The phone ringing and muffled television program offstage added to this layered and anxietyprovoking soundscape.

13

While this chapter does not focus in detail on Tom Wright’s role as translator and dramaturg for these adaptations, their collaboration was significant and enduring throughout Kosky’s Australian theatrical career. 14 For a discussion of the role of Talthybius in Kosky’s The Women of Troy, see Slaney (2011).

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As Mara Davis discusses further in Chap. 6, towards the end of Kosky’s production and after all the women were prescribed their fate, the chorus and Hecuba sang the happy-go-lucky tune “When You’re Smiling”, written in 1928 by Larry Shay, Mark Fisher and Joe Goodwin, accompanied by Daryl Wallis on an onstage piano. They sang it over and over again as they were thrown into boxes in the practical wall that formed the back of the stage while gunshots blasted around them. Or more precisely, they repeatedly sang the song’s refrain “when you’re smiling, when you’re smiling”. That the song’s formal closure was frustrated increased the sense of repetition. The singing voices became increasingly desperate until the song ended in discordant shrieks rather than the melodic and harmonic conclusion that the song’s structure demands. The women of the chorus were then dragged from their boxes, flung onto a trolley and shot by the guard. The emotional catharsis one might expect to result if this scene were followed by stillness and an opportunity for the audience to experience an emotional release was obstructed by the irritatingly repeated rings of the unanswered telephone offstage. The enthusiasm of the repeated lyrics and the major key of the piano accompaniment prior made the horror to which the audience bore witness even more intensely felt, while the telephone ringing impeded the purging of the emotions this scene provoked. The dissonance between the joyful mood of the song and the violence of the stage action contributed to this discord as well. Indeed, Michael Halliwell described this as “a self-consciously estranging moment emphasizing the trope which runs through the production: the absolute banality of evil” (2011, p. 55). The repetition of the lyrics, the gunshots, and the ringing telephone were affectively overwhelming, where a surplus of dramaturgical elements layered through repetition stymied a cathartic encounter for the audience and instead produced the type of estrangement that Halliwell describes. In ways similar to the Myrrha scene in The Lost Echo, the repetition of the women’s singing “When You’re Smiling” was in excess of what was required to communicate the plot, and yet made the very excess of their trauma felt. I would suggest that the inability of the audience to purge their emotions mirrored traumatic experience. Again, repetition at once communicated and stretched the representational aspects of the play. More specifically, it can be said that the “When You’re Smiling” scene was an example of Martin’s “theatre of the real”, where the highly physical nature of the performance had material impact on the actors’ bodies, especially their vocal cords, which in turn became part of the performance’s materiality and its reception.15 This can be distinguished from Fabre’s use of violence in performance because physical endurance in Kosky’s work always in some way related to or was an extension of the dramatic narrative. In the case of The Women of Troy, for example, Kosky’s intensely physical treatment of the actors’ 15

This intensely physical approach to directing performance germinated for Kosky in his work with Jewish-Australian theatre company Gilgul that he co-founded with Robert Lehrer in the 1990s in Melbourne. Critic Charles Green described the actors in Gilgul’s The Dybbuk (1992), for example, as having “paraded in chorus lines, tumbled across the concrete floor, enduring hosing down with freezing water” (1992, p. 122).

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performances occurred in moments from Wright’s adaptation of Euripides’ script that called for an emotional response to the characters. Yet the palpable physical exhaustion of the performers as well as the real impact of the sound design on the spectator’s bodies, instead meant that trauma was mobilized affectively and performatively on the performers’, actors’, and character’s bodies through Kosky’s strategic use of repetition. In the “When You’re Smiling” scene from Women of Troy we see an example of repetition being used in Kosky’s theatrical work in ways that denies catharsis for characters and the audience. While in some ways related to the plot, the repetition of the song, gun shots and phone ringing in Women of Troy were not structural devices or signposts marking critical moments in a narrative arc. Rather, the repetition drew attention to the ways in which trauma in performance must rupture representation in order to produce traumatic affect.16 If trauma is inherently in excess of what can be represented narratively or through language, the introduction of a bricolage of representational and non-representational dramaturgical elements becomes necessary in order to “represent” (following Duggan) the affect of traumatic encounter with fidelity to a character’s experience. At the same time, character as a dramatic concept must crucially also reach a breaking point, again where selfhood, not emotion, can be purged. This was seen through the cohesiveness of Nevin’s performance of Hecuba’s character becoming frayed through the repetition of the singing, which drew considerable attention to her corporeality as an actor. By this I mean that I was made acutely aware of the physical labour the performance demanded of her through the intense expectations placed on her body, especially through her screaming/singing. The blurred doubling of dramatic categories (character, actor) that resulted through the scene’s performative violence meant that any emotional response to the work was also in excess of what was accounted for in the play text, because of the extratextual aspects of the performance. At the same moment that Hecuba reached a traumatic breaking point in the narrative, her character ruptured and Nevin’s “real” body rapidly broke through. While tensions between the theatrical and the real are invariably always present in live performance, this moment in Women of Troy revealed a break down in Hecuba’s character at the same time as there was an emergence of the real. In other words, the representation of Hecuba’s trauma co-existed with my acute awareness of Nevin’s exhausted body, treading a fine line between real and theatrical violence. This, in turn, connects to discussions at the intersection of trauma and performance studies where in Duggan’s words the “collapse” between mimesis and the real “creates an unease which is cognate with the experience of traumatic reoccurrence” (2012, p. 64). He continues: “The tension of interplay between the mimetic/fictional order and the real/non-fictional order [. . .] is central to the embodied experience of performance, and thus its capacity to act as traumatic mirror or indeed to impact as traumatic” (2012, p. 65).

16 For an excellent discussion on the relationship between trauma, violence, and affect in performance, see Trezise’s discussion (2012) of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Engonidia.

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We would not be aware of the physical exhaustion the actors endured through their singing of “When You’re Smiling” if it was not repeated to the extent that it was, or if that aspect did not have to compete with the other scenic elements that were also repeated. While there may have been what McCallum and Tom Hillard describe as a catharsis of “psychic trauma and bodily emissions” in this performance and that repetition was a critical modality in effecting this, it was not a conventional catharsis purging the audience’s emotions. Rather, it was a denial of emotional catharsis through boundaries between the real and theatrical becoming rapidly blurred by repetition. A cohesive representation of dramatic character was ruptured, instead representing trauma through dramaturgical elements, affectively. We see this again in Kosky’s controversial production of King Lear in 1998, which will be the final production examined in this chapter.

King Lear Kosky’s King Lear was both vehemently criticized and celebrated by audiences and critics (Severn 2019, pp. 70–73). Many took issue with its apparently irreverent disregard of what they believed were Shakespeare’s intentions for the work. There was incestuous innuendo between Lear and Cordelia in Kosky’s production which may have contributed to some of the outrage. Louise Fox also performed a version of The Fool that was infantile burlesque star-meets-Jacobean court jester. Another aspect that contributed to the “shock factor” of Kosky’s King Lear was that Bell Shakespeare Company’s founder John Bell played the title role: the anticipated grandeur of his performance was eroded in Kosky’s staging, in which for much of the second act he “shuffled about dressed like a bag lady” (Kiernander 2000, p. 130). The first act was carnivalesque, whereas the second act was more sinister and abstract.17 In fact, the set in the second act according to one critic recalled a “Greyhound bus station from hell” (Moriarty 1998, p. 32). For part of the second act, Bell/Lear sat in the bus station on a plastic chair, tearing pieces of paper into tiny shreds. This was not a tearing up of something significant such as a letter within the narrative of the performance, but rather a performative action that both related to Lear’s traumatized instability in the play and enacted an unravelling of character as dramatic concept. What I mean by this is that if character forms “the basis for the theatrical illusion itself” (Storm 2016, p. 1), this illusion was ruptured by virtue of Lear’s character unravelling. Said differently, bearing witness to a prestigious Australian actor reduced to wearing a dishevelled nightgown and tearing paper into shreds, Kosky used Bell’s “real” persona to perform a kind of temporal doubling (and troubling) between the narrative of the performance and the performance itself. Bell was not tearing up a letter: he was

17

Kosky’s King Lear has been discussed in terms of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque: see Severn (2019), pp. 69–85; Kiernander (2000).

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repeatedly tearing pieces of paper into tiny shreds. This action in some ways related to the king’s decline in Shakespeare’s play at the same time as operating performatively, “tearing up” what was left of his already trembling subjectivity as a character. While related to the narrative by virtue of the fact that Lear is indeed losing his mind, this repeated action also extended beyond the narrative of the play, becoming just that: John Bell tearing up pieces of paper. As has been suggested, trauma is haunted by doubles: the traumatic event and its various doubles take form through dreams, flashbacks, and transferences. While Lear’s action of tearing up the paper represented his downfall, it was also an unnervingly mundane action within the context of a Bell Shakespeare Company theatrical production. As such, it is another example of the representational excess of trauma in performance and its overspill articulated through repetition in a Kosky production. Trauma was doubled in the scene: there was Lear’s trauma in the narrative, and the use of dramaturgical repetition to make trauma felt through the performance. Parallels can be drawn here between McElhinney removing her underwear in the Myrrha scene, Nevin singing “When You’re Smiling” in Women of Troy, and Bell as King Lear. All of these characters’ repeated actions related to their traumatic experiences in the text all the while bringing the mimetic cohesion of character undone by not allowing the audience to emotionally identify with them because of the repetition. So rather than the emotional identification between spectator and character that is the critical bedrock of conventional catharsis, in Kosky’s directorial approach to staging trauma in the narrative, these scenes enacted a traumatic purging of character’s selfhood rather than emotion. There is nowhere for the spectator to locate herself in these black holes of traumatized and emptied dramatic subjectivity. This in turn makes the character’s traumatic encounter flesh through the performance precisely through the absence of emotion made available to the spectator. It follows that emotion is absent because trauma is representationally overfull; so overfull that dramatic character as a concept shatters. Just as trauma cannot be adequately represented in terms of emotional re-enactment, the representational traction of a character must be ruptured in order for their trauma in the narrative to be felt by the audience. This does not lead to an emotional catharsis, but more to a mobilisation of traumatic affect. This is not to suggest that spectators were not touched or moved by these scenes. Philippa Kelly writes that the bus station scene in King Lear created “one of the most moving, and, in a sense, inexplicable, scenes I have witnessed in the theatre” (2015, p. 71). For her, the inexplicability promoted through Lear’s action of tearing up paper and his mumbled lines contributed to her being moved. Indeed, I would suggest that the cohabitation of Lear’s experience as a character and the abstraction of this through the repetition made for a scene that resonated with the contemporary moment; a moment in which trauma and its doubles has become a cultural trope (Wald 2007, p. 3). However, being moved is different from identifying with a character emotionally and, therefore, personally and subjectively. Viscerally affected by Lear’s depersonalization in the scene, the audience bore witness instead

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to a dramatic world that was in many ways incomprehensible, yet for some deeply felt.

Conclusion Under the “mental swoon of postmodernism”, Elinor Fuchs explored the “Death of Character” in her 1996 book by the same title, writing that “‘Character’ is a word that stands in for the entire human chain of representation and reception that theater links together” (p. 8). Fuchs accounts for the death of character that occurred in much postmodern theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, with a focus on America and the UK. This was of course predated by the work of avant-garde auteur directors in Europe including Antonin Artaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Tadeusz Kantor, and Jerzy Grotowski. Indeed, when Kosky began making work in the 1980s, theatre witnessed a shift away from representational narrative drama towards an epistemological questioning of meaning-making and human subjectivity in performance. Within this climate, a proliferation of alternative forms of performance flourished at the intersection of live art, installation, circus, and drag. In Australian theatre and opera during this period, Kosky’s work contributed to the groundswell of these experimental forms, and drew inspiration from this shifting conceptual and theatrical climate. However, Kosky also has consistently demonstrated a sincere and sustained interest in story-telling and narrative structure, which differentiates him from postmodern theatre broadly conceived and postdramatic theatre directors such as Fabre who use repetition for other purposes. In this chapter we have seen not so much the death of character in Kosky’s work, but more a dynamic tightrope walk between a character’s traumatic experience in the narrative and repetitions which enacted trauma dramaturgically. These dramaturgical elements spanned an actor’s repeated movement (The Lost Echo, King Lear) and repetition in the sound design (The Women of Troy). Accordingly, the complex relationship between representation, trauma, and repetition in Kosky’s staging of character is central to producing the affective thrust of his stage productions. While this took different forms in the productions examined in this chapter, they all brought dramatic character into question while using the sheer impact of the character’s traumatic experience within the narrative as part of the performance. Repetition in Kosky’s productions discussed in this chapter staged character’s traumas in ways that denied catharsis. The psychodramatic accuracy of staging characters’ encounters with trauma at the same time as character as a dramatic concept became “traumatized” was central to effecting this. Rather than inviting an emotional engagement with the performances, repetition operated to represent trauma in the narrative while also making the sheer representational excess of trauma visible. Repetition in Kosky’s The Lost Echo, The Women of Troy, and King Lear thus operated in part to exhaust representation. By the same token, repetition is endemic to traumatic experience, which also transgresses representation. Repetition thus presents itself as a rich and complex modality in Kosky’s theatrical practice to

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engage with characters’ traumas on stage. This aspect of his work demonstrates a care for his characters, a commitment to mythological storytelling, and a passion for making these stories affective and vital for a contemporary theatre audience. He achieves this in large part by transgressing representational theatre’s normative bounds. In rupturing the mimetic foundation between spectator and stage while maintaining aspects of traditional narrative theatre, new intensities and flows of spectatorial encounter are made available through Kosky’s stage productions that invite a rethinking of catharsis.18

References Atkinson, M., & Richardson, M. (Eds.). (2013). Traumatic Affect. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bennett, J. (2005). Empathic vision: Affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caruth, C. (Ed.). (1995). Trauma: Explorations in memory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkin University Press. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative and history. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkin University Press. Cole, E. (2020). Postdramatic Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duggan, P. (2012). Trauma-tragedy: Symptoms of contemporary performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Farrell, C. (2021). Barrie Kosky on the contemporary Australian stage: Affect, post-tragedy, emergency. London: Routledge. Ford, A. (1995). Katharsis: The ancient problem. In A. Parker & E. K. Sedgewick (Eds.), Performativity and performance (pp. 108–132). New York: Routledge. Fuchs, E. (1996). The death of character: Perspectives on theater after modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gibbs, A. (2013). Apparently unrelated: affective resonance, concatenation and traumatic circuitry in the terrain of the everyday. In M. Atkinson & M. Richardson (Eds.), Traumatic affect (pp. 129–147). New York: Routledge. Golden, L. (1962). Catharsis. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 93, 51–60. Golden, L. (1969). Mimesis and Katharsis. Classical Philology, 64, 145–153. Golden, L. (1973). The purgation theory of catharsis. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 31(4), 473–479. Golden, L. (1976). Epic, tragedy, and catharsis. Classical Philology, 71(1), 77–85. Green, C. (1992). Gilgul: Town Hall Motors. Art Forum, 31(2), 122. Halliwell, S. (1986). Aristotle’s “Poetics”. London: Bloomsbury. Halliwell, M. (2011). The Women of Troy: Barrie Kosky’s “operatic” version of Euripides. Didaskalia, 8, 48–57. Haughton, M. (2018). Staging trauma: Bodies in shadow. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Hume, D. (1757). Of tragedy. Four dissertations. London: A. Millar. Kiernander, A. (2000). The unclassic body in the theatre of John Bell. In P. Tait (Ed.), Body show/s: Australian viewings of live performance (pp. 124–135). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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In chapter four of my book, Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage, I rethink catharsis through the prism of affect in light of Kosky’s work. See Farrell, 2021.

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Lear, J. (1988). Katharsis. Phronesis, XXXIII, 3, 297–326. Lehmann, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis. Little, S. (2015). Repeating repetition: Trauma and performance. Performance Research, 20(5), 44–50. Lucas, F. L. (1957). Tragedy: Serious drama in relation to Aristotle’s “Poetics”. London: Hogarth Press. Martin, C. (2013). Theatre of the real. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McCallum, J. (2010). Putting it Back Together and Getting it on the Road: Australian Theatre in the 21st Century. The 2010 Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture. Edited transcript available in John McCallum. Theatre That Messes with Your Mind. The Australian, 29 November. McCallum, J., & Hillard, T. (2010). Shocking audiences modern and ancient. Australasian Drama Studies, 56, 131–153. Moriarty, K. (1998). Faecal Attraction. Woroni, 1 September. Munteanu, D. L. C. (2012). Tragic pathos: Pity and fear in Greek philosophy and tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phelan, P. (1997). Mourning sex: Performing public memories. London and New York: Routledge. Prior, Y., & Richards, A. (2002). Into the Wilderness: Gilgul’s “physical” theatre 1994. Australasian Drama Studies, 41, 28–49. Richardson, M. (2013). Torturous affect: Writing and the problem of pain. In M. Atkinson & M. Richardson (Eds.), Traumatic affect (pp. 148–171). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Scheff, T. J. (1979). Catharsis in healing, ritual, and drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schrödl, J. (2012). Acoustic violence in contemporary German theatre. Critical Studies, 36(1), 79–98. Severn, J. R. (2019). Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical. Abingdon: Routledge. Slaney, H. (2011). Delivering the message in Kosky’s Women of Troy. Didaskalia, 8, 33–47. Storm, W. (2016). Dramaturgy and dramatic character: A long view. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trezise, B. (2012). Spectatorship that hurts: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio as meta-affective theatre of memory. Theatre Research International, 37(3), 205–220. Trezise, B., & Wake, C. (Eds.). (2013). Visions and revisions: Performance, memory, trauma. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Vernant, J.-P., & Vidal-Naquet, P. (1988). Myth and tragedy in Ancient Greece. New York: Zone Books. Wald, C. (2007). Hysteria, trauma and melancholia: Performative maladies in contemporary anglophone drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Charlotte Farrell holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Recently, she has taught in the Program in Dramatic Literature at New York University and was the Executive Director of Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn from 2017–2020. Farrell is the author of Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage: Affect, Post-Tragedy, Emergency (Routledge, 2021).

Chapter 6

When All Else Fails, Sing: Barrie Kosky’s The Women of Troy Mara Davis

Abstract When asked if he had ever staged a production without music, Barrie Kosky’s response was a definitive no. His production of The Women of Troy, produced by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008, is an exemplar of his particular approach to the use of music in theatrical productions. Into Tom Wright’s terse adaptation of Euripides’s The Trojan Woman, Kosky inserted a wide variety of vocal music, ranging wildly in style and compositional period. The selections include John Dowland songs, arias from the operatic repertoire, folk songs, American popular song, and more. This music, rather than playing a subsidiary role, equalled the text in importance, leading Halliwell (The Women of Troy: Barrie Kosky’s ‘operatic’ version of Euripides. Didaskalia 8, 2011) to wonder whether Kosky had rendered the Euripides text an opera. Building on Halliwell’s work, this chapter argues that The Women of Troy is operatic rather than opera. In doing so, it articulates Kosky’s sophisticated engagement with operatic tropes and conventions, and how he reconfigures them for a dramatic context.

Over the course of Barrie Kosky’s theatrical career, which now spans more than three decades, he has produced a broad spectrum of works: canonical and contemporary opera, operetta, cabaret, Broadway musicals, avant-garde devised theatre, Shakespearean plays, works by Brecht, and many more. However, what is ubiquitous in his work, no matter what style or genre he is working in, is the presence of music. In an interview with the Australian composer and radio presenter Andrew Ford, when asked if he had ever staged a production without music, Kosky’s response was a definitive “no” (Ford 2009). He went on to say that he sees no marked difference between directing opera and directing theatre and that in his practice, these distinctions are quite arbitrary: “My theatre pieces and my opera pieces sort of sometimes [merge]” (Ford 2009).

M. Davis (*) University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_6

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The Women of Troy, staged at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008, is an eminent example of this aesthetic. After the success of The Lost Echo (2006), an epic four-part adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kosky and his long-time collaborator Tom Wright were commissioned by Artistic Director Robyn Nevin to create a new work for the company. This work, entitled The Women of Troy, also took its inspiration from a classical text: Euripides’s The Trojan Women, a tragedy first performed in 415 BC that recounts events that take place directly after the fall of Troy. Kosky and Wright’s stripped-back adaptation ran for just ninety minutes and was performed without interval. It follows the fate of four Trojan women in the aftermath of the war: the deposed queen, Hecuba; her daughter Cassandra; the princess Andromache; and the infamous Helen of Troy. The role of Hecuba was played by Nevin herself, while the three latter women were all played by Melita Jurisic. The relatively short length of the production meant that it made significant alterations to the Euripides text, namely the removal of the gods and the messenger, and the reduction of the chorus to what Keith Gallasch (2008) describes as three “battered” women, played by Queenie Van Der Zandt, Jennifer Vuletic and Natalie Gamsu. Joining these five women on stage were two nameless security guards, played by Patricia Cotter and Kyle Rowling; King Menelaus, confined to a wheelchair, and portrayed by John Dignam; and the child Astyanax, son of Hector and Andromache, played alternately by Narek Armaganian and Nicholas BakopolousCooke. The production also played a season at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne later the same year. Edith Hamilton’s oft-quoted characterisation of the Euripides play describes it as “the greatest piece of anti-war literature there is in the world” (1971, p. 1). Kosky’s production reflected this interpretation through the evocation of images of twentyfirst-century warfare. The Women of Troy staged confronting scenes reminiscent of the War on Terror and the infamous leaked photographs of Abu Ghraib prison camp. The set featured a wall of stark metal lockers at the back of a sparse, dingily carpeted stage, and this austere stage design was accompanied by a harsh, fluorescent lighting design. The bleak and unsettling atmosphere created by this mise-en-scène was intensified by David Gilfillan’s sound design, which combined muzak with the sounds of the everyday: unanswered telephones, muffled conversations and screams. Throughout, fired somewhere from offstage, deafening gunshots sounded without warning, reverberating throughout the performance space and rattling the seating bank. By the conclusion of the narrative, the three women played by Jurisic have been killed, packed into cardboard boxes, taped up and wheeled away. The chorus are forced into the lockers and shot. Only Hecuba survives, left to mourn the body of her grandson before she too is taken away to become a slave to the victors. The production was deeply affective and was described by reviewer John McCallum as “one of the most harrowing nights in the theatre I have ever spent.” McCallum went on to note that it was perhaps “too harrowing for many [. . .] there were apparently many walkouts every night. We’re talking about a show with no interval, so walking out is a big statement” (2010, p. 20). Alison Croggon characterised the production as “probably as close as we can get to what the emotional experience of classical tragedy might have been like” (2008).

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Key to this was Kosky’s restoration of music as an integral part of the dramaturgy of the Euripides’ play. Interspersed into Wright’s text is a wide variety of vocal music, ranging wildly in style and compositional period. The selections include John Dowland songs, arias from the operatic repertoire, Slovenian folk song, American popular song, Gesualdo madrigals, songs by Schumann, and more. The transnational nature of the music assisted in encouraging the audience to read the onstage events as not fixed in one time or place: the horrors of war were not here restricted to Ancient Greece or Abu Ghraib. This music is predominantly performed by the women of the chorus, who throughout the production sing rather than speak, accompanied by a lone piano played live on stage by Daryl Wallis. While The Women of Troy has been the subject of scholarly attention on numerous occasions (Kiernander 2010; Ewans 2011; Hale 2011; Johnson 2011; Slaney 2011; Varney et al. 2013; Farrell 2018), only Michael Halliwell’s analysis (2011) grapples deeply with the significance of music to the production. The genesis of the analysis in this chapter is in Halliwell’s observation that what “struck” him about the work was “the complex role that the music performs and the weight that it is expected to carry in the dramatic thrust of the production.” He went on to say that “music forms the backbone of the production, and it certainly does much to propel the emotional narrative of the play. The question is: does it turn Greek tragedy into opera?” (2011). This analysis responds to Halliwell’s proposition by arguing that, rather than opera, what Kosky has produced is a work that sits in the liminal space between opera and drama. It is, in Eric Salzman’s definition, music theatre: “theatre that is music driven,” where “music, language, vocalization, and physical movement exist, interact, or stand side by side in some sort of equality” (2008, p. 5). What Halliwell has astutely identified is that The Women of Troy engages deeply with operatic forms, tropes, techniques and conventions: perhaps we could say that it is operatic rather than opera. This chapter will illuminate a number of features of the work that can be analysed in this vein. The connection between Greek tragedy and opera is well known. As Jason Geary notes, opera is generally understood to have developed “in part out of an impulse to emulate the role of music in Greek tragedy and to return to what some scholars believed was its entirely sung nature” (2010, p. 47). Kosky (2008) himself foregrounded this in the programme note when he stated that “over half the original would have been sung”. In this sense, Kosky’s production honours the spirit of the intellectual and artistic enquiry that led to the development of opera. However, Michele Napolitano notes that in actuality there were few operatic adaptations of Greek tragedy proper until the advent of the twentieth century, where suddenly stagings of fifth-century Attic plays proliferated. He posits that this is because of what Adorno described as the “immanent crisis of form” and that in this context, Greek tragedy “served to open opera up”, providing the “ideal conditions for radical innovations” (2010, pp. 45–46). Kosky’s twenty-first century pseudo-operatic production of Euripides is thus a continuation of a long history of the combination of the two forms and the experimentation that such adaptations have engendered. Importantly, for Kosky,

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In opera, people are experiencing—on an incredibly unconscious level—a return to an archaic form of storytelling ritual that we need [. . .] It is a special thing and it’s a live experience: the human voice coming out of the human body that you can only hear in this space at this time. Opera is something that says more about our mortality and our emotions than most other things (Service 2015).

It is this that Kosky is trying to capture when he adopts conventions associated with opera in The Women of Troy.

Kosky and Music As Croggon notes, Kosky’s “first and informing theatrical love is music” (2010, p. 4), and it plays a central role in all his works, regardless of genre. According to Tom Wright, his style of directing is akin to the work of an orchestral conductor because “he hears the production he wants” (Hallett 2008). In discussing his process for approaching a new opera, Kosky foregrounded the importance of listening: Even if I’ve listened to a piece 20 times, I have a ritual that we’ll follow [. . .] I will meet with my design team and we will all sit in the one room and we’ll listen together to the music, right through, because the start point and the end point is always the music. Even though I talk about drama and even though I talk about text and design and performance, the starting point and ending point for inspiration and for what I want to achieve on stage is the music (Karlin 2018)

He has not always been deemed to have lived up to this ambition. In the 1990s, Kosky’s productions for Opera Australia were roundly criticised for their perceived unfaithfulness to the music. In defence of his panned production of Nabucco from the criticism that the music of Verdi was “not good enough for him,” (Gattegno 1995, p. 19) he retorted that Verdi’s aural landscape is one element of the production. The libretto is another. History is another. Visual imagery is another. The music in itself does not contain all the clues, answers and information for performance [. . .] The music does not tell you what color a costume should be [. . .] Music is abstract aural sensation. Correct or incorrect, right or wrong are simply useless words in a serious discussion of opera’s musical landscape (Kosky 1995, p. 16).

In his non-operatic works, Kosky has been less bound by such expectations, and has been freer to experiment. These productions demonstrate a range of different approaches to the use of music in the theatre. Of primary concern is the role of music in the hierarchy of dramatic elements. In a 2009 interview, Kosky remarked that What I [. . .] always try to capture in a show . . .[is]. . . how the music can trigger off things that then are sort of, it’s like a reeler, you can use the music and then the baton is passed to the text, and then the text is passed to an image [. . .] this is what I like, that there’s no hierarchy within it, and what the music enables me to do is provide, in a way, the soil for the other things to be on. So, I always talk about music being the landscape, and on the landscape are bodies and texts and other things (Ford 2009).

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He is uninterested in an aesthetic in which all elements of the performance work to reinforce the same dramatic idea, and treating music in this way allows it to become a mechanism by which he resists, to an extent, logocentrism. In an interview I conducted with Tom Wright, he expressed that Kosky views music as a way to subvert the endless appeal to rationality, and the way in which the contemporary western world seeks to sort of privilege the concrete, the known, the rational, the real, the narrative, the linear, all that kind of stuff. But music can be quoted, appreciated, loved, and at the same time rendered absurd.1

This is in keeping with his vision of the theatre is as a “place for the sublime and the vulgar” (Hallett 2008), and sublimity, in Kosky’s work, is generally conveyed through music. He enjoys such stark juxtapositions and has said that he has “tended to think about theatre as a little bit of this, a little bit of that, put it all together and see what happens” (Litson 1997, p. 16). He likes to subvert conventions associated with the performance of music, particularly when it comes to beauty. As Hallett (2008) notes, in the Gilgul productions “there was always music or singing in one form or another and great moments of beauty, which quickly dissolved into ugliness or squalor”. This is also an important feature of The Women of Troy and will be discussed later in the chapter.

Speech and Song In the programme, Kosky was billed as director/musical director, highlighting the centrality of music to the production. In The Women of Troy, the music occupies almost an equivalent stage time to Wright’s text. Halliwell describes the work as nearly “through-composed”, as one song frequently transitions to the next with no applause to separate them (2011). All the musical selections are existing works—no newly composed music appears in the production—and have no clear relationship to each other. They are written in different time periods and showcase different styles of music. Some selections are in languages other than English, and those that do have English texts are focused on broad themes (the most common being love and death). Sometimes, lyrics are abandoned altogether. The rendition of the Slovenian folk song, for example, is sung on a single sound, “oj”. In the case of works taken from operas, Kosky includes two well-known arias from the operatic repertoire: the “Romance” from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers and the Terzettino “Soave sia vento” from Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte. Kosky ignores the dramatic contexts attached to these works, which results in what Halliwell describes as an “incongruity between the words of the song and the context in which it is sung” (2011). These famous works are stripped from their contexts and treated as malleably as any of the 1 The interview was recorded at the Sydney Theatre Company on 3 August 2011. All other citations refer to this interview.

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other less well-known works. The rendition of the Bizet, for example, abandons its characteristic barcarolle feel, rendering it almost unrecognisable. The performers are flexible with pitch, style, and interpretation. All these factors reduce the temptation to read the music as supporting the narrative of the playscript. While both are integral components to the work, ultimately the text is neither subservient to the music, nor the music to the text. Spoken and sung words are placed on an equal playing field. In our interview, Wright made the observation that the “more musically driven one of Barrie’s works is, the less control or say I have in the rhythmic construct of the piece than I would in a piece which is more literarily driven”. Consequently, his adaptation of the Euripides play is a terse, highly compact text that is akin to an operatic libretto. The short sentences, which are often broken up into even smaller units, sound almost as if they are waiting for music to be composed to them. There is a strange emptiness to the words, and this quality, free of verbosity and over-description, further ensures that the music does not become a subsidiary element. This is reflective of Wright and Kosky’s view that language is just part of a broader musical continuum. Wright commented to me that the more you work with a director or an artist like Barrie the more you realise that the total rhythm of what is heard on the stage is actually one of the core components of theatre. And quite where music in inverted commas begins and where music in inverted commas ends, within that stream, is unclear. At what point a Classical Shakespearean actor is singing their lines and at what point they’re actually reciting them [. . .] So I think for Barrie the way in which he integrates music, whether it’s improvised or whether it’s quoted or whether it’s appropriated, it all is part of the continuum that includes language.

Edith Hall notes that the Ancient Greek language features a “clear distinction between long and short syllables [that] makes it probable that singing and speaking were not separated from one another in the same way as in most modern European languages” (1999, p. 103). The performances in The Women of Troy display this flexible continuum between speech and song, and the rhythmic qualities inherent in the text are illustrated well in Hecuba’s opening speech: Country, gone. Children, gone. Husband, gone. Wealth, gone. No city. No Queen. The Gods grind me down. Crush me. Face, skull, ribs (Wright 2008).

One can easily imagine these words set to music, and reviewer Kevin Jackson acknowledged this when he praised Robyn Nevin for her superb handling of Hecuba’s “great textual arias” (2008). This conspicuously operatic turn of phrase conveys the musicality of both Wright’s language and Nevin’s performance.

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Beautiful Music It was frequently remarked upon by reviewers that the beauty of the music and the singing provided a strong counterpoint to the intense violence and horror expressed in the text and in the staging. McCallum (2008), for example, asked “So what is uplifting about all this horror? What makes it a great tragedy, rather than just a nightmare? It is, as you’d expect with Kosky, the music”. However, the music in The Women of Troy plays a more complex role than just to offer a respite from the atrocities detailed in the text and represented on the stage. While it certainly does provide some reprieve, Kosky also implicates the beauty of the singing in the violent and brutal acts with which it is juxtaposed: if the music, as McCallum claims, is what is uplifting about this horror, then the horror is what is specious about art in an oppressive system. The music is a tool to aestheticize the suffering of the chorus—a Prozac of sorts for an audience that is unwilling or unable to fully comprehend the tragedy at hand. It beguiles the audience, giving them a false sense of hope amongst the horror, only to have this hope definitively shattered by the end of the production. Evidence for this claim is that the music is not quite as sublime as it may first seem. The “frequent distortions and musical inadequacies” (Halliwell 2011) present in the musical arrangements act as an important mechanism for Kosky to subvert a fundamental operatic characteristic: lyricism (Till 2004, p. 17). In the Slovenian folk song (“Slepacka—Klagelied des Blinden”), performed by the chorus, the final high B is deliberately sung with a thin, strained tone, rendering it a painful rather than sublime moment. The performance of the Gesualdo madrigal is highly volatile, with an unsteady tempo and lack of precision in the harmonies and rhythm. When Nevin performs the second Dowland song, “In Darkness Let Me Dwell”, the final note is deliberately out of tune, creating a buzzing discordance. While there are certainly moments of beautiful singing, throughout The Women of Troy Kosky also makes extensive use of “ugly” vocal sounds. He has a long history of not subscribing to orthodoxies around vocal quality, particularly in operatic contexts. Wright recounted that When he was in his early twenties when people would say, you know, “You’re doing a piece of opera, why don’t you use proper voices?” and he says that he doesn’t believe that there is a correct way to sing. He understands that there are classically ordained ways of singing and there are ways that can sing for greater effect or greater musical precision, but he doesn’t believe that there’s a correct way of singing.

Specifically, in relation to The Women of Troy, Wright explained that Kosky had a desire to cast a diverse range of voices, and that he was looking for very particular qualities when he auditioned them: He hadn’t worked with those women before. Jennifer Vuletic is not a trained singer but she’s someone who can hold a tune and who’s done shows and so on, but she’s fundamentally an actor who comes out of that background, I mean, she does Mamma Mia [. . .] [but] you wouldn’t describe [her voice] as coming out of any particular tradition. Natalie Gamsu is Namibian-Jewish but fundamentally a cabaret performer, Queenie Van Der Zandt likewise. And the fact that he’s got two cabaret performers, and in that sort of range, and from that

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background would seem counter-intuitive but what he liked was their capacity to treat their voices with that plasticity.

This plasticity is essential in giving Kosky access to a broad spectrum of vocal qualities, of which he makes full use. As he said in a recent interview, If you want pure voice, go to a concert, if you want purity of sound, listen to a CD. I’m not interested in purity of sound: I’m interested in the entire connection between the singer’s voice, the singer’s body and the singer’s body and voice in combination with another singer’s body and voice (Karlin 2018).

This is certainly the approach in The Women of Troy. The women of the chorus utilise a combination of classical singing, contemporary singing, soft sounds, and guttural vocal sounds. Even in speaking, the voices are often pushed to their extremes, as the intense volume of the gunshots that punctuate the performances often called upon the cast to strain in order to be heard over the top of them. This contributes to what Charlotte Farrell describes as the “acoustic violence” created by the production (2018, pp. 111–12). Moreover, the voices of these three women are frequently juxtaposed with those of Melita Jurisic and Robyn Nevin, who possess instruments with rougher timbres. However, this distinction is not a value judgment. Kosky respects these voices equally for their ability to create sounds that would not ordinarily be produced in an operatic context. In this sense, Kosky understands that a Greek tragedy is “a vocal rather than just a semantic script, a composition directing a variety of implementations of the capacities of the human voice” (Ley 2010, p. 84). The performers’ interpretation of the spoken text often seems musically conceived. Halliwell (2011) describes the performance of the two Dowland songs by Nevin and Jurisic as a “tuneless and off-pitch ‘Sprechgesang’”. Nevin self-describes her timbre as “croak factor” (Usher 2008, p. 17). It is harsh, but so precise and has such a sense of phrasing that it is unquestionably musical. Cassandra’s monologue is characterised by distorted, garbled text, full of harsh consonants: “Stripping striprip hard king he has no things he has no me he hasn’t” (Wright 2008). Jurisic screams, splutters, coughs, gargles, and gurgles her way through these words, akin to a bastardised operatic cadenza of a troubled soprano. These linguistic choices force the emphasis to be placed also on the sound of the words themselves, and as a result, the vocal tone of the performer and the physicality of its production, what Roland Barthes describes as the “grain” of the voice (1977, p. 188). The use of amplification intensifies this focus. All the performers wear face microphones, regardless of whether they are speaking or singing. While Michael Connor’s review describes Nevin’s voice as “unnecessarily miked” (2008, p. 68), the use of microphones in The Women of Troy serves a larger purpose than just to make sure the actors are easily heard. This is particularly true in relation to Robyn Nevin’s voice, as the use of the microphone literally amplifies the grain of her voice, intensifying the way that it “hugs the possibility of poetry like a desolation” (Craven 2008, p. 18). Salzman argues that amplification technology has liberated new opera and music theatre production, opening up a wide variety of sounds previously not available in acoustic contexts. What amplification technology facilitates is “the artistic use of close-up sound and makes expressive intimacy (not to mention true

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pianissimos) part of the singer’s repertoire” (2008, p. 23). Moreover, it supports “the differentiation of style to the point of individualized vocal sound and technique” (Salzman 2008, p. 23). The chorus takes full advantage of this technology by utilising the full range of soft dynamics, ordinarily unavailable in acoustic contexts. Finally, amplification adds exponentially to the tense atmosphere of the production. As Peter Sellars observes, the microphone has come to occupy the place in contemporary theatre that the mask occupied in the theatre of ancient Greece. It is a device that creates both intimacy and distance, it conceals and it projects, it acts as a shield and as a medium of relentless exposure [. . .] It fills a vacuum, while creating another vacuum: that is to say, it dominates physical and emotional space while at the same time creating a certain inevitable hollowness (2009, p. ix).

This hollowness described by Sellars is well-suited to the overall atmosphere and aesthetic of the production. Additionally, the use of amplification intensifies the experience of the singing as intrinsically corporeal. As Carolyn Abbate notes, in opera the sound of the singing voice becomes, as it were, a “voice-object” and the sole center for the listener’s attention. That attention is thus drawn away from words, plot, character, and even the music as it resides in the orchestra, or music as formal gestures, or abstract shape (1991, p. 10).

In The Women of Troy, this diversion of attention is not possible, as the same voices that sing the beautiful music are violently beaten, bruised and bloodied throughout the production. An apt example occurs early in the performance, when the chorus enters singing a three-part arrangement of John Dowland’s “Now, O Now I Needs Must Part”. The vocal tone of the women is light and delicately soft, with a captivating subtlety and control. But there is a catch—as they slowly move onto the stage, the audience sees that their faces are covered with hessian bags. While it becomes apparent that the voices are coming from the concealed prisoners, the subtlety of the vocal tone, and the fact that they stay very still throughout this scene, almost gives the illusion that the voices are coming from elsewhere. Disembodied singing, Abbate notes, is an “operatic cliché—all those voices from heaven, from hell, from the wings, from trapdoors and catwalks” (2001, p. xv). By presenting the image thus, Kosky makes the materiality of the women’s bodies, bound and constrained as they appear to us, explicit. However, their voices do not struggle against these constraints: they are subtle, controlled, soaring, and the combination of the music and the theatrical image has rendered them simultaneously corporeal and otherworldly. The physical presence of these battered women, constrained by the bags over their heads, eliminates the mystical powers usually ascribed to operatic disembodied singing. The operatic disembodied voice is represented affectively and viscerally, and reinforced by the musical selections, “disembodied” from other works. Additionally, the microphone amplifies breaths, the sounds of mouths moving, and so on—it makes the bodily suffering of the women, and the energy they must expend to continue singing under such circumstances impossible to ignore.

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But it is the conclusion of The Women of Troy that most potently suggests that music’s power is ultimately impotent. Underneath Menelaus’s last speech, sharp chords from the piano begin to sound. These chords, ambiguous at first, gradually form the opening of the 1929 Shay, Fisher and Goodwin song, “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).” The jovial, bouncy and vaudeville-like opening of the song feels unsettling from the outset, given what has preceded it. The harmony has been re-voiced so that the third of the chord is less apparent, allowing the open fifths and octaves to dominate. Furthermore, the existing chromaticism of the song is pushed to its extreme and exploited so that the tonal centre of the song begins to disintegrate. The three women of the chorus sing with pushed, bright and brassy sounds reminiscent of old Broadway singers like Ethel Merman, but with a harder, more dangerous edge—a strikingly different colour than has been previously utilised. Gradually, the song descends into a cacophonic madness, and the women begin to scream. Even when the piano has stopped playing and the song, for all intents and purposes, is over the continued screaming of the women becomes part of the music, creating a most disconcerting ending. After this, all three are shot dead point blank by a prison guard. The chorus have been responsible for the “beautiful” music throughout the production. Their demise, and the violence to which the singers and the song are subjected indicates, as Halliwell (2011) observes, “that even music is not enough”. This scene, he argues, is “the culmination of a consistent musical strategy” that ultimately “leaves the audience with a sense that even music cannot transcend the despair and darkness at the heart of the production” (Halliwell 2011). The contrast between the live music and David Gifillan’s sound design reinforces the bleak aesthetic created by Kosky. The audience enters to the soft sounds of the 1973 Charlie Rich song, “The Most Beautiful Girl”. Underneath the opening image, a soundscape emerges: first a low drone sound interspersed with the sounds of faint conversation. Some isolated orchestral sounds—strings, a clarinet—are followed by the conspicuous ringing of a telephone. The muffled conversations continue. Loud bursts of pop songs punctuate the scenes at unexpected times. This sound world of synthetic, disparate, mundane and seemingly unrelated sounds acts as a stark contrast to the music performed live. The live music collapses under the weight of the pain of suffering of the women who have to use their breath, muscles, and energy to sing it. The recorded sounds belong to the world of the prison guards who callously photograph their tortured captives, rendering the production, as Jana Perkovic (2008) describes it, a “very clear manifesto on the banality of evil”.

The Lone Piano A hallmark of Kosky’s theatre productions in Australia was his frequent appearance on stage as a pianist. He has described playing in his own productions as providing him with his artistic and musical “kicks” (Boyd 2005). In a recent interview which made reference to how, during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown in Berlin, he revived

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this practice of performing as pianist in his own works, accompanying several Komische Oper singers in an online mini-concert series,2 he said that I play the piano very rarely in public, and so I get such enjoyment out of doing it, particularly when accompanying. I’m not interested in playing solo, I just like playing with great people. I feel happy and secure when they’re in front and I’m playing away behind them—but also it’s a middle finger, to show people around the world who assume directors aren’t musical or that directors don’t know or care about music. All of that is nonsense. Sometimes it’s good to remind people of that (Kustanczy 2020).

In Australia, he has appeared as such in the Gilgul productions, King Lear (1998), The Lost Breath (2003), The Lost Echo (2006), The Tell-Tale Heart (2007) and Poppea (2009). For Kosky, the embodied act of playing the music that is to feature in his production is an important part of the process of making sense of a work. The Lost Echo had featured Kosky on the piano, conducting from a small prompter’s box beneath the stage, in full view of the audience. This established convention of Kosky as onstage pianist was intended to continue in The Women of Troy and indeed, he began rehearsals for the production from behind the piano. However, he was required on another project in Berlin the day after opening night, and thus another pianist needed to be procured to take over for him after this point. This musician was Sydney pianist Daryl Wallis, who believes that he came to Kosky’s attention as the accompanist for Jennifer Vuletic’s audition, where they had presented some bespoke arrangements from their cabaret work.3 Wallis’s account of the rehearsals offers great insights into Kosky’s method of incorporating the music into the production. In the first instance, Wallis was an observer to rehearsals, and his task was to make notes documenting Kosky’s musical approach: “He would try different approaches to accompanying individual songs each day, teasing out what the most effective approach would be”. The sheet music that they used was taken from original scores, and no other score was ever produced; that is to say, the particularities of the arrangements were developed intuitively and recorded aurally rather than transcribed for posterity. As rehearsals moved into the theatre, “I took over at the piano stool as all the technical elements started to come together. I don’t remember a lot of musical notes coming my way from Barrie during this phase other than some tempo tweaks and some underscoring notes”. The original plan was that Kosky would play the opening night and then leave for Berlin, but Wallis recounts that after the “final dress run he came down to the piano at the lip of the stage and said that he now thought I should continue to play not only during the previews, but play opening night as well”. Kosky’s endorsement of Wallis’s playing is more significant given Kosky’s idiosyncratic style of piano performance, which has been variously described both affectionately and with disdain. Wright

2 At the time of writing, one of these is still available on YouTube. The soprano Nicole Chevalier gives a 30-minute recital, accompanied by Kosky. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼GaMbZmNdSg [accessed 11 February 2021]. 3 Personal communication, 29 July 2020. All subsequent quotations from Daryl Wallis are from this source.

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describes that in the Gilgul productions, he “played the piano so loudly, you couldn’t hear the actors” (Hallett 2008). His stamp of approval in allowing Wallis to play the whole season indicates that the musician had managed to capture Kosky’s essence in his playing. Therefore, Wallis’s performance of the music should be interpreted as part of Kosky’s broader vision for the work, rather than as a utilitarian feature of the production. The lone piano is an essential part of the experience of the work as a whole. Halliwell (2011) felt that the piano was somewhat lacking, and he argues that Kosky fails to extend the “tonal and expressive potentialities” of the pianoforte to the same degree that he achieves with the voices. He states (2011) that the most frequent form of accompaniment is chordal, often in the form of spiky staccato chords [. . .] the sound is often aggressive and harsh [. . .] Occasionally there are virtuosic flourishes from the piano, but for the most part the accompaniment is extremely minimalistic and discreet, often only providing tonal orientation for the singers rather than any real accompanimental support or direction for the voice.

I would argue that this is absolutely in keeping with the overall tenor of the production. Ultimately, the women of the chorus are left to their own devices. The piano is a more banal version of the guards who witness but do nothing to alleviate their suffering. The accompaniment frequently adds discordancy to the tuneful harmonies of the three singers. In the performance of Bizet’s ‘Romance,’ performed in the middle of Cassandra’s monologue, Kosky places chords in several climactic places that are not present in the original harmony. Texturally, sparseness is key. Frequently, only the upper register of the piano is used, and the tinny, metallic quality mirrors the mood that is evoked by austere, impersonal filing cabinets and dingy carpet that also occupy the stage. Moreover, denying the piano its full expressive potential creates a disconcerting feeling that something is missing. It is rendered unable to fill the space and cover the troubling silences, of which there are many. In this sense, it is an additional contributing factor to the hopelessness at the heart of the work: that music cannot and will not save us. As Halliwell (2011) observes, “At the end of many operas (not to mention other dramatic representations) we leave the theatre feeling deeply moved and ultimately uplifted despite the subject matter”. The Women of Troy has precisely the opposite effect, and it does so by “anatomising rather than suturing the disparate components of the operatic” (Till 2004, p. 22). The production demonstrates Kosky’s sophisticated engagement with the structures, conventions and tropes associated with the operatic. The result is the creation of unique aesthetic that puts music at the centre of the creative process and the performance outcome: a true music theatre.

References Abbate, C. (1991). Unsung voices: Opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Abbate, C. (2001). In Search of Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Barthes, R. (1977). Image-music-text. London: Collins. Boyd, C. (2005). Director seeks new stages to conquer great Kosky. Australian Financial Review. June 25. Retrieved June 15, 2020, from https://www.afr.com/politics/director-seeks-newstages-to-conquer-great-kosky-20050625-j7asq. Connor, M. (2008). On the importance of being Kosky. Quadrant, 52(12), 67–69. Craven, P. (2008). A nightmare by glaring torturer’s light. The Australian. 5 Nov. Croggon, A. (2008). Review: The Women of Troy. Theatre Notes. November 20. Retrieved September 15, 2020, from http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2008/11/review-women-of-troy. html. Croggon, A. (2010). Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky: Two innovative Australian directors. TheatreForum, 37, 3–12. Ewans, M. (2011). The Women of Troy—new and old. Didaskalia 8. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/8/10/. Farrell, C. (2018). Trembling specters: Barrie Kosky’s Women of Troy as post-tragedy. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 32(2), 105–116. Ford, A. (2009). Barrie Kosky and the essence of music in opera and theatre. The Music Show. ABC Radio National. 21 November. Radio program. Retrieved July 4, 2020, from http://www.abc. net.au/rn/musicshow/stories/2009/2739788.htm. Gallasch, K. (2008). Return of the gods. Realtime 76. Retrieved June 20, 2020, from http://www. realtimearts.net/article/issue76/8275. Gattegno, M. (1995). ‘Shock! It’s Nabooco.’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September. Geary, J. (2010). Incidental Music and the Revival of Greek Tragedy from the Italian Renaissance to German Romanticism. In P. Brown & S. Ograjenšek (Eds.), Ancient drama in music for the modern stage (pp. 47–66). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hale, E. (2011). The Women of Troy: Barrie Kosky, The Sydney Theatre Company, and classical theatre in Australia. Didaskalia 8. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from http://www.didaskalia.net/ issues/8/7/. Hall, E. (1999). Actor’s song in tragedy. In S. Goldhill & R. Osborne (Eds.), Performance culture and Athenian democracy (pp. 96–124). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hallett, B. (2008). War and caprice, Kosky style. The Sydney Morning Herald. 6 September. Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/warand-caprice-kosky-style-20080906-gdstte.html. Halliwell, M. (2011). The Women of Troy: Barrie Kosky’s ‘operatic’ version of Euripides. Didaskalia 8. Retrieved March 1, 2020, from https://www.didaskalia.net/issues/8/9/. Hamilton, E. (1971). Euripides: Trojan Women. New York: Bantam. Jackson, K. (2008). The Women of Troy. Kevin Jackson’s Theatre Diary. 1 Oct. Retrieved May 14, 2020, from http://www.kjtheatrediary.com/2008/10/women-of-troy.html. Johnson, M. (2011). “Toothless intellectuals”, “the misery of the poor”, “poetry after Auschwitz”, and the white, middle-class audience: the moral perils of Kosky and Wright’s The Women of Troy (or, how do we regard the pain of others?). Didaskalia 8. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/8/11/. Karlin, D. (2018). Crafting magic on the opera stage: Barrie Kosky. Bachtrack. 30 Nov. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://bachtrack.com/interview-barrie-kosky-part-1-directingensemble-november-2018. Kiernander, A. (2010). Abjected arcadias: images of classical Greece and Rome in Barrie Kosky’s Oedipus, The Lost Echo and The Women of Troy. Australasian Drama Studies, 56, 109–116. Kosky, B. (1995). Kosky defends his Nabucco. The Sydney Morning Herald. 19 September. Kosky, B. (2008). The Women of Troy. In The Women of Troy, theatre programme. Sydney: Sydney Theatre Company. Kustanczy, C. (2020). Barrie Kosky: ‘Crises Always Bring Out The Best And Worst Of People.’ The Opera Queen. 15 Jul. Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://www.theoperaqueen.com/2020/ 07/15/barrie-kosky/.

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Ley, G. (2010). The theatricality of Greek tragedy: Playing space and chorus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Litson, J. (1997). Kosky keeps his vision, but no glasses. The Australian. 12 September. McCallum, J. (2008). Horrors leavened by song. The Australian. 23 September. Retrieved June 2, 2020, from https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/horrors-leavened-by-song/news-story/ 88cd01db121ffa0b0824e41f3cc1a275?sv¼5b9ac310681af935f7c610f71e44cd6b. McCallum, J. (2010). Theatre that messes with your mind. The Australian. 28 November. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/theatre-that-messes-with-yourmind/news-story/4e7d72d47f5bb6c5e603259adfb098ed. Napolitano, M. (2010). Greek tragedy and opera: notes on a marriage manqué. In P. Brown & S. Ograjenšek (Eds.), Ancient drama in music for the modern stage (pp. 31–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perkovic, J. (2008). The Women of Troy; a more discursive response. Guerrilla Semiotics. 28 Nov. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://guerrillasemiotics.com/2008/11/the-women-of-troy-amore-discursive-response/. Salzman, E. (2008). The new music theater. New York: Oxford University Press. Sellars, P. (2009). Foreword. In Sound and music for the theatre: The art and technique of design (pp. viii–ix). Burlington: Elsevier. Service, T. (2015). Barrie Kosky: “When I first saw The Magic Flute, I didn’t get it and I didn’t like it”. The Guardian. 14 July. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2015/jul/13/barrie-kosky-the-magic-flute-i-was-like-euggh. Slaney, H. (2011). Delivering the message in Kosky’s The Women of Troy. Didaskalia 8. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/8/8/. Till, N. (2004). “I don’t mind if something’s operatic, just as long as it’s not opera”: a critical practice for new opera and music theatre. Contemporary Theatre Review, 14(1), 15–24. Usher, R. (2008). She’s just mad about Barrie. The Age. 7 November. Varney, D., Eckerstall, P., Hudson, C., & Hatley, B. (2013). Theatre and performance in the AsiaPacific: Regional modernities in the global era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, T. (2008). The Women of Troy. Archival script. Sydney: Sydney Theatre Company Archives.

Mara Davis is Lecturer in Performance and Theatre at the University of Wollongong. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts from UOW, awarded in 2011 with First Class Honours and the University Medal, as well as a degree in music from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she majored as a flautist. Mara’s research focuses on music theatre in all its forms. She is a current Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales, where she is writing about national identity in contemporary Australian musical theatre.

Chapter 7

Barrie Kosky’s Grotesques and the Ecstasy of Theatre James Phillips

Abstract Kosky’s productions are at times exorbitantly stagey. What stops them from tipping over into mere spectacle is the grotesque. The garishness undercuts the innocuous make-believe of show business without reasserting the norms of everyday life. It is a way of making spectacle serious but not humourless, of pushing spectacle into ecstasy and surprise. This strain in Kosky’s work communicates with the grotesque tradition of Australian comedy (Sir Les Patterson, Kath & Kim), just as it connects with the utopianism Mikhail Bakhtin theorised in relation to the carnivalesque and Theodor Adorno in relation to the messianic. By means of the grotesque Kosky situates his work within a recognisably Australian theatrical ethos and simultaneously articulates a critique of Australian society. Kosky’s critical side has been less pronounced in his productions as head of the Komische Oper Berlin (2012–), but it has not disappeared. His revivals of pre-1933 operettas have bucked against post-war scheduling and directorial trends that, in effect, endorsed the Nazis’ suppression of these works. In its non-intellectualism, the grotesque is a form of critique that can inhabit and employ the superficial and the glitzy. It can make an operetta an indictment of the times without slipping into didacticism.

What can an object as small as a sequin tell us about Barrie Kosky’s trajectory as a director? He does not use them in every work, but he has used them repeatedly over the last three decades. From glistening fitfully and malevolently on the darkened stage of his early Australian productions, they now blaze and sparkle in the high-key lighting of his full-blown musical numbers at the Komische Oper Berlin. It might seem—and in one sense there is no reason to dispute the appearance—that Kosky has made his peace with show business. The ironic and heavily qualified citations of the Las Vegas Strip and the Folies Bergère have given way to a straightforward embrace of the possibilities and techniques of the entertainment industry. The stage is flooded with light and the sequins that had once been unfairly expected to J. Phillips (*) School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_7

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Fig. 7.1 Male and female chorus members raise their skirts in Orpheus in the Underworld (dir. Barrie Kosky, Salzburg Festival 2019). Screengrab from Unitel/ORF/ZDF/Arte DVD

manufacture their own luminescence, like bathypelagic fish, come into their own, which is to say, they enter into the radiance that they can only ever borrow, reflecting and refracting, as designed, the lamps trained on them. To an extent, a sequin is already always an ironic citation. It affords the semblance of ornament without being anything more than a metallic or iridiscent disc sewn on to a costume. It fools no one with its glitter, and yet its sole and established function is to enhance the visibility of the wearer. It provides the suggestion of affluence that nonetheless even the audience members in the back row manage to see through (because the deception was not in earnest, it is not resented). Flickering between being and illusion, sequins are themselves performers. In Kosky’s 2019 production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld for the Salzburg Festival, the male and female dancers hoisted aloft their skirts during the cancan to display stitched into their undergarments the sequined genitalia that were the theatrical truth of their sex (Fig. 7.1). To say that Kosky has made his peace with show business is to say only that he has arrived at a different manner of engaging with what is specious and gaudy about it. The falsity and the fictionality are not and cannot be extinguished by being embraced. The question is: what has changed in how they are deployed and how they operate? This is a question of the status of the grotesque in Kosky’s work. Kosky’s sequins are the snail trail that the grotesque leaves as it intrudes upon the staging of texts otherwise largely immune to it. This is not necessarily irreverence, the charge levelled at his 1996 production of Nabucco for Opera Australia. If the grotesque can hold a score at a distance, it can also be the only route by which to approach it. At issue is a judgment not on the work so much as on one’s relationship to it: the closer one draws to the work, the more awkward one’s movements become, the more garish the wardrobe—not out of resistance or any supercilious aggression to so-called canonical authority, but because this is precisely what the work commands if its incompatibility with the everyday is to be respected. In Kosky’s 1993

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Oedipus Rex for Opera Queensland, for instance, the supermarket shopping trolley with which the blind protagonist tried to feel his way does not have to be taken as disavowing the significance of the catastrophe. It showed up the glibness with which it is ordinarily pretended that this mythic material remains intelligible to us: unless the tragic caesura regains its impenetrability, we have not “understood” it. As a scrupulously authentic historical re-enactment of Athenian tragedy likewise cannot escape being grotesque through its non-compliance with existing theatrical norms, the challenge is not so much how to be in on the joke as how to make the audience think and feel that the grotesque is its problem as well. For Wolfgang Kayser (1981), the truth content of the grotesque, in all its distortions and exaggerations, is the insight into the alienation of the world. It is the truth of (the facing up to) the retreat of the possibility of truth. The grotesque is the art of the margins and of marginalised groups. It can be decorative, as in the drolleries of late medieval illuminated manuscripts and in the profusion of small, fantastic figures Alessandro Allori and his workshop painted on the ceilings of the Uffizi. And it can be bitter, as in the Grosse Fuge of Beethoven’s opus 133 and in Rimbaud’s assault on the corporeal and spiritual proprieties in “Mauvais Sang”. For their part, the sequins in Kosky’s early productions are at once decorative and bitter, since they contribute to the spectacle of power while also enacting a commentary on its seediness and cruelty. Exemplary in this regard are the royals of the 1998 King Lear for Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company who were made up as over-the-top caricatures of courtly ostentation. The vibrant, saturated and unreal colours of their faux fur gowns stood out against the darkness and spareness of the set but rather than prevailing over them, the costumes took on a darkness and poverty of their own. In this production aspects of the avantgarde Eastern European Yiddish theatrical tradition that Kosky had adopted in his previous work with the Gilgul Theatre, such as the stylised poses and the thick white pancake of the interwar Vilna Troupe, were brought to bear on a text long a martyr in the popular imagination to its own canonicity. As consistency risks turning into a new touchstone and measure, Kosky did not opt for a uniform aesthetic even within the grotesque: the Meyerholdian grotesque of John Bell’s Lear thus jarred against the Baby Jane/Shirley Temple grotesque of Louise Fox’s Fool who mocked him by singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”. By testifying to unredeemed life, the grotesque is not without a redemptive force specific to it. It clears away, disrupts and unsettles: it deviates from the norm, inverts it and fails to hit upon it. Just this, according to Bakhtin, is what embodies the folk insurrection of the carnivalesque: “Born of folk humor, [the grotesque] always represents in one form or another, through these or other means, the return of Saturn’s golden age to earth— the living possibility of its return” (1984, p. 48). Bakhtin finds fault with Kayser’s version of the grotesque, contending that the latter’s definition applies only to modernism and even then only partially. For Bakhtin, Kayser hears the grotesque’s verdict on the existing world but misses its promise of another. Indeed, what gaiety Kayser discerns in the grotesque he attributes to artists’ mastery in containing the demonic.

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Kayser is not alone in his uneasiness with the carnival aspects of the grotesque. Where there is folk humour, there is, for Peter Fingesten (1984), only ever the quasigrotesque. Yet by snapping off the grotesque from its popular roots Fingesten deprives it of its subaltern vigour and relish for antinomianism. That such a position could have occurred to anyone indicates the distance that has been travelled since the first major philological study of the grotesque, Karl Friedrich Flögel’s Geschichte des Groteskekomischen (1778): Flögel’s wide-ranging survey has eyes only for its carnivalesque dimension and never considers alienation to fall in its remit. Even half a century later, in Victor Hugo’s famous Preface (1909) to Cromwell (1827), when the grotesque is drawn in from the margins of European art to combine with the sublime in drama, it is readers’ association of the grotesque with the comic that Hugo takes as his starting point. But commentators who overlook the humour of the grotesque are not so much blind as narrow in their focus: they single out the pugnacity and ill will for which the institution of carnival is both a release valve and a containment mechanism. In a democracy, where the fashioning of norms has become a collective affair, carnival inevitably becomes a grotesque relic of itself, since the people who spill into the streets for the sake of inverting the norms that prevail during the rest of the year invert norms of which they are now the nominal author. The folk insurrection of carnival, which in the past had been temporally constrained, collapses in on itself— or where it survives it gives the lie to democracy, rendering it grotesque by exposing the gulf between the myth of the collective authorship of norms and the reality.1 In the theatre, a grotesque production of a play has the disruptiveness of carnival. But a grotesque production can be less an act of violence that a director perpetrates on a text than a declaration of allegiance to the text’s otherness. It can recover a work from the clichés with which it has become encumbered and even if the work itself initiated them, they were not clichés to begin with (every text that is a victim of its own success lies awake, as it were, pining for someone to rescue it from its performance history). Grotesque productions are a mnemotechnic, unreliable and erratic to be sure, but what they grope for in the past are the intensities that are otherwise inaccessible under the accreted performance conventions. In the essay “Bourgeois Opera” from 1955 Adorno writes conversely of the betrayal of works by stagings that are insensitive to their non-identity with the present: The state of opera is not to be envied amid an administered humanity, which, regardless of political system, no longer concerns itself with liberation, escape, and reconciliation, as in the opera of the early bourgeoisie, but instead desperately stops up its ears to the sound of humanity in order to be able to survive—happy, contented, and resigned—while caught up in the wheels of industry (1999, pp. 26–27).

1

For a discussion of the grotesque in contemporary demagogic populism, see Crosby (2020). In the case of figures such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Berlusconi, the grotesque antics make for a yearround carnival. But what this carnival gains in duration, it surrenders in depth: the structures upholding inequality and injustice are not inverted, but are even entrenched under the cover of the supposed crisis of institutional norms.

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Opera, for Adorno, is not a contemporary art form, but that amounts far more to a judgment on the inhumanity of contemporary audiences than on opera (it would be reprehensible apologetics to make out that conditions have improved in the 65 years since Adorno published his essay). A seamlessly updated staging cannot save a score and libretto for the present because it is the present that first of all needs saving. In calling opera anachronistic, Adorno is not arguing for it to be no longer performed. But in having become untimely, these works expect performers who know how to hesitate in realising them, who know not to run roughshod over the works’ coyness with regard to the present. This is a coyness that works have even in relation to their own present simply by virtue of being received as art. The openness of performance and the distance at which a work stands from its present can confirm each other. One might say that the very performance of a work spares it some of the worst excesses of its own adaptation. This is because the performance involves an understanding of the present at odds with the present that is routinely invoked when the case is made for an updating. The open “now” of the performance is not the cramped shorthand for contemporaneity that adaptations frequently clutch at: the corporeal intimacy of the singular here-and-now of performance is both too close and too fleeting for the larger social coding that enables a fad, for instance, to pass for a marker of the current epoch. In its openness, the “now” of performance is a Cluedo secret passageway to other pasts. The openness is a theatrical expectation on the part of the performers and the audience inasmuch as they are alert to the possible. If this expectation of and as the possible does not lend itself to being realised, it can nevertheless be betrayed, which in an updated staging can come about when the performance space caves in upon itself under the dead weight of mere topicality. But a work is of course not always the “victim” in an adaptation. It can be the aggressor. An adaptation can view the process of updating as a means of providing the work with fodder, of turning the work from the past into a devourer of presentday clichés. Abetted in stealing up on a sclerotic present, the work launches itself on the latter’s symbols. This untimeliness in the score and libretto can harmonise with the grotesqueness of a production. More than simply attesting to the work’s non-identity with the present, the grotesque likewise sets about contesting the norms against which it is judged. What comes across pejoratively as grotesque to an audience, because it fails to conform to their aesthetic templates and social values, is from another vantage point, needless to say, nothing of the sort—a slight shift in perspective and what appeared malformed or disfigured as in an anamorphic image assumes a different cast. If there is nostalgia in grotesque stagings of works from the past, it is a very odd kind of nostalgia—a nostalgia for a past that never was, for the past’s own open-ended dreaming of future escapes. A grotesque staging can draw out into the open the alternative forms of life that are immanent to the work and that other stagings gloss over. It looks back upon the work and lays claim to it from the vantage point of revolution, even if this does not preclude the grotesque from here being also tempted to pre-empt revolution and to parody it for theatrical ends. The funhouse mirror that the grotesque holds up to reality is not unconnected with redemption and furthermore not unresponsive to the task by which Adorno defines

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thought that is neither technics nor reconstruction: “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (2005, p. 247). Shone upon the present, this light operates like the hyperspectral imaging that has come to be used at crime scenes to coax material evidence into visibility. The grotesque makes its entrance. In Christ Carrying the Cross (c. 1510–35), ascribed to a follower of Hieronymus Bosch and held by the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, Christ’s persecutors are exposed thus as what they are in the messianic light: cretinously sniggering, raddled with vice, and lost to the enormity of their own actions. As played by Alexander Granach, the frenzied movements and outlandish gestures of Knock, Count Orlok’s factotum in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), bear corporeal witness for their part to the stirrings of a new form of life, the era of the vampire, just as many of Dostoevsky’s characters, with their improprieties, exasperations and blockages, are prophets of an age that their nervous systems are the first to register. At times in Kosky’s productions the shimmer of the sequins similarly announces what has been glimpsed from afar. But whereas Adorno, in this final paragraph of Minima Moralia (1951), proceeds to convert the messianic light into a Kantian postulate—“beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters” (2005, p. 247)—the theatrical grotesque is incapable of such equanimity: it both believes fervently in the messianic light’s judgment on the existing world and repudiates messianism as an extra-theatrical distraction and rival (“the show must go on”). Needless to say, not every manifestation of the grotesque involves adopting a position on messianism. To interpret the pagan grotesques of Nero’s Domus Aurea in this way would be wilfully obtuse. When Horace, for example, writes of laughter as the fitting response to a painter who “chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse” (1929, p. 451), there is no acknowledgement of anything more serious at stake. Yet the grotesque can have a serious agenda it pursues and still fall short of an encounter with messianism. But when it fully surrenders to the ferocity of its impulses and discovers the mayhem of the Grand Guignol wherever it applies its hand, it prefigures the inversions of the eschatological event and the tribunal from which the Messiah passes sentence on history. And it can do all this without forfeiting its sense of fun: whether the grotesque’s disregard for prevailing norms has to do with the temporary suspension of these norms (the carnivalesque) or the anticipatory revocation of these norms (the messianic) can be historically undecidable. If there is a confrontation with the question of the messianic in Kosky’s work, it is not restricted to the explicitly Jewish material with which he has engaged, although it is bound up with this material and galvanised by it. In The Lost Echo, Kosky’s eight-hour 2006 production for the Sydney Theatre Company of his and Tom Wright’s adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and The Bacchae of Euripides, the coming of the god was an incident in a derelict public toilet, the last place that this fallen world would look for a god and precisely because this world is in the wrong on all counts, it is there that the god appears. The scene cannot be labelled irreligious without discounting the antinomianism that is a feature of the disruptions with which

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Fig. 7.2 John Shrimpton and Martin Blum in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Lost Echo, 2006, by Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright. Photo: © Tania Kelley/Copyright Agency, 2021

new revelations of the divine take their toll on the evaluative frameworks of the cultures in which they occur. But it also cannot be pretended that the scene is an inoffensive exercise in piety. The scene conveyed something profound about the turning points in the history of religions, although it likewise only played at presenting the divine. The god did not break through the tinsel of show business: what the audience saw cross the stage to a stridently sombre musical accompaniment was, instead, a male performer in a pair of bloodied white underpants, high heels and a pink feathered headdress, for the theatre has its own store of amulets for warding off the evil of the supernatural world (Fig. 7.2). The eschatological inflection that Kosky brings to the grotesque is enough to differentiate it from the comic grotesque that has long enjoyed prominence in Australian popular entertainment. Where Kosky’s Australian productions met with resistance, it is arguably not so much because local audience and critics were unused to the grotesque as because they were unused to the grotesque outside of comedy (for all his transgressions Barry Humphries’ character Sir Les Patterson knows his place when it comes to genre). The difference should nonetheless not be overstated between Kosky’s grotesque and the grotesque strain in Australian comedy, since the latter has its own more complex, more belligerent story to tell in relation to prevailing norms. The grotesque does not diverge from these norms simply in order to extract a comic effect that simultaneously confirms their standing. It can indict these norms for their tyranny, throwing a light on the damage they wreak. The very different arts of the corporeal grotesque that Lynda Gibson and Jane Turner invented

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in their stage and television work externalise a crippling self-consciousness and lay bare the shaming and policing culture of Australian bodies. The awkwardness is taken to a point of no return, where physical awkwardness cannot be faked since there is (and can be) no known training for it apart from first-hand experience. By putting this awkwardness on show, Gibson and Turner defied the judgment that theirs were bodies unfit for the public gaze. As a comically bad dancer, Turner is sui generis: no other performer quite compares with her in the number of norms she flouts and in the resourcefulness with which she conceives alternatives. Turner’s dancing is indicative of the larger achievement of Kath & Kim (2002–2012), for what Turner and her co-star and co-writer Gina Riley mobilise is a gaucheness that is so spirited and ingenious that it invalidates the norms that might otherwise be adduced to condemn it. Turner and Riley’s Kath and Kim are grotesque caricatures of suburban women, but the derogatory image of the typical Australian (an image of the subaltern of principally English coinage) as working-class, naïve and vulgar is run with and exploded. The solecisms and malapropisms with which they litter their conversations demonstrate, on the one hand, an ignorance of English usage and therefore substantiate the derogatory image of the typical Australian, yet the flights of fancy of these same solecisms and malapropisms attest, on the other hand, to an exhilarating linguistic brilliance and carnivalesque exuberance. Their postcolonial grotesque throws into question the difference between success and failure, between good and bad taste. Accordingly, when Kim in one episode wears a T-shirt with a hatted basset hound rolling its eyes heavenwards like a saint’s and with the slogan beside it “Girl Power” it is hard to know what to think and still harder to care. The strength of the comic tradition of the grotesque in Australia is in many ways also a revealing liability. The departure from conventions, from statistical averages is enough to elicit laughter from certain, generally older audience members in Australian theatres. However slight the divergence from the everyday and no matter how grim its consequences for the perpetrator, companies can be sadly confident that there will be people in the auditorium who will laugh. Discomfort is not to be processed differently, and since theatrical performances are by their very nature exceptions to their spectators’ daily routines, every theatrical performance arouses discomfort and with indefatigable wrongheadedness is dealt with by being received as bedroom farce. At times the strain shows in this mode of appreciation. Reviewing Kosky’s 2008 Sydney Theatre Company production of The Women of Troy, the right-wing critic Michael Connor took umbrage at its depiction of brutality to prisoners of war but still believed he could discern the route back to his default setting: “Familiarity with Kosky’s work breeds neither respect nor outrage but giggles” (2008). Connor neglects to mention that in its opening scene the production referenced the most infamous of the photos taken of the prisoners of war from Abu Ghraib. For him, this opening was about Kosky’s self-indulgence and nothing besides: far be it from an Australian theatre to suggest that its audiences might reconsider the Howard government’s commitment to the invasion of Iraq (cf. Croggon 2010, pp. 9, 10).

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If by laughing one seeks to flag to the company that one is not taken in by the artifice in its displays of gore, there is the curious assumption that the company is in fact ashamed of the artifice and will be brought up short if forced to admit to it. This can scarcely be said of a Kosky production, since the artifice and trickery of the stage is not the hidden weakness of the horror but even one of its more salient elements: no sunlight will ever break in upon this world in which the only illumination that the inhabitants have to guide themselves by comes from sequins. By taking things too far, Kosky tugs at the stitches of the theatrical illusion of reality and thereby forces the audience to acknowledge that they are indeed watching a play. But the more vocal Australian theatregoers have a trick for skipping their Brechtian appointment with consciousness. Discussing Kosky’s King Lear, Rachel Fensham writes: “Edgar shits his pants and when he smears the turds across his face, the audience laughs in revulsion” (2009, p. 91). What happens on stage is grotesque but the response to it is likewise grotesque, which is not to say that there is an isomorphism, let alone a crossfertilisation between the two. Kosky has over the years inveighed against the conditions in which theatre has to operate in Australia. Having proposed how teaching institutions could profitably reform their approaches to actor training, he nonetheless adds: “you do really need to change the entire attitude to performing and theatre in Australia, or all those other things I’ve talked about are meaningless” (Macaulay 2003, p. 19). The actor’s lot is symptomatic of a larger malaise: The whole scene for an actor in Australia is pretty dreadful. That kind of striving for the sublime is missing in training, and it’s missing in the profession. For a start, to be an actor in Australia is to be a third-rate citizen. There is no respect for actors in this country (Macaulay 2003, p. 14).

This lack of respect is not something that Kosky believes poorly trained actors have brought about on their own. On the contrary, the lack of respect is a reason why standards are not higher in the teaching institutions and among professionals. To make theatre in Australia is to work in a hostile environment, for to make theatre is to hold open the public realm—and to cram it with fiction, affect and gesture—when so many political, psychosocial and economic forces in the country concertedly press to seal it up. Governments and the funding bodies caught in the orbit of their policies or rhetoric try to persuade themselves and the public at large that there are not enough Australian stories being told, that the voices and experiences heard on stage are unrepresentative. Not far beneath the surface of this discourse lurks the suspicion that theatre as such, as an institution and as a way of life is incompatible with the version of Australia to which they are attached (the federal government’s unwillingness to bail out theatre companies during the COVID-19 pandemic is hard to construe otherwise). No increase in local content will address the problem, because the problem is with theatre as a public space for the contestation of reality. If Australian theatre has a deep-seated tendency to the grotesque, it is because to perform in public in Australia already means to turn one’s back on the national orthodoxy that life is a purely private undertaking. The oddness begins with the very first step into the light of the public realm: the body is thrown out of kilter in this

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alien atmosphere, which cannot even be taken for granted but has to be first constructed through a defiant physical non-conformism. Rather than attempting to mitigate the oddness by stocking the theatrical frame with that which might reassure an audience by means of its familiarity and everydayness, Kosky gives the oddness its head. Theatre, for Kosky, does not exist under the collective house arrest that prevails in the Australian imaginary and that election campaigns consolidate with their pitches to families instead of citizens: “the whole Aussie backyard, I never felt any connection with it. [. . .] it’s not my Australia, and I’ve got nothing to say about it” (Kosky 2004, p. 31). The backyard is a faux outside, since even though it is open to the elements, it is hidden from the street. Reflecting on what the theatre as such, the theatre in general is able to accomplish, Kosky puts forward, however, the following positive definition: The theatre seems to me the perfect place for the ecstatic to manifest itself. Theatre is by its very nature an alchemical mix of manipulation, ritual and stimulation. Body, voice, light, sound. Who really knows what will be unleashed or unearthed when these forces combine. Or in what theatrical moments these forces will choose to emerge (2008, p. 51).

Ecstasy, which Teresa of Ávila (1988) both dreads and desires because it cuts her off from converse with her fellow human beings, is here the outcome of the most sociable of the arts—a being apart with others. Were one to read this as Kosky’s take on the rationale of theatre as an art form, attributing to him the instrumentalisation of theatre in the pursuit of ecstasy, then one must also acknowledge that Kosky clearly considers theatre an unreliable tool for attaining that end. It is unreliable, but even so it has a competitive advantage because of the very number and type of forces that it can bring into play. It promises yet must stop short of guaranteeing the ecstatic because the ecstatic cannot be predicted and does not follow a formula. The general programme that lurks in the above quotation from Kosky’s On Ecstasy (2008) has therefore less to do with the implementation of a theory than with a director’s declaration of faith in the complex sign systems in whose midst he finds himself. Kosky instrumentalises theatre only to the extent that he simultaneously commits himself to treating individual productions and the individual components of those productions as public sites of experimentation: how they might work together to conjure the ecstatic into existence is not something that can be foreseen and calculated in the abstract. To side with the ecstatic is already to adopt a stand on the concept of theatre— more precisely, on the conceptual purism of practitioners and critics who valorise what sets theatre apart from other art forms and other activities more broadly. The grotesque has no patience with purism. By eschewing the options traditionally available to the theatre, by renouncing, even denouncing character, narrative, depiction, spectacle and so forth, a director decides in advance against combinations from which the ecstatic, in Kosky’s sense, might happen to result. If, theatrically, Kosky is by contrast profligate in the sign systems he swings into operation, it is because he does not subordinate to a concept, let alone a dogma of theatre the chances an individual production throws up. Given the ecstatic’s unpredictability, an openmindedness that can smack of desperation is by no means out of place, since one

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has to be on the look out for the ecstatic without being able to say beforehand what shape it will assume. This is not to claim that the ecstatic is unrecognisable. The psychicalphysiological condition of ecstasy is precisely what allows it to be recognised, to be known for what it is albeit only once it has been found. The “ecstatic”, as Kosky employs the term, is a metonym: the consequence has become the name for the disparate, heterogeneous, even unrepeatable theatrical phenomena that cause it. That the touchstone for recognising these phenomena is an affect rather than a set of objective criteria does not of itself indicate that Kosky imposes his own private feelings on the theatre as its purpose (eighteenth-century aesthetics from Shaftesbury to Kant again and again resisted the identification of the subjectivity of feeling with the merely personal). The inapplicability of objective criteria in the recognition of the ecstatic means that a theatre that sets out in search of the ecstatic will necessarily have to train itself to take advantage of any opportunity that comes its way. It will have no concept with which to clear the path ahead of it, excluding certain elements and arrangements because they do not satisfy the general definition composed by objective criteria. The ecstatic, because in its unpredictability it favours opportunists, compels theatre practitioners to keep open the here and now of performance. And theatre, inasmuch as it is alive to the singularities of which it consists, will make of its here and now an appeal to the ecstatic. There is in this a version—not altogether derisory—of messianic attentiveness, since it involves a recognition that the prevailing norms and rules are not to be trusted. Where it breaks out into the grotesque, it proclaims its distrust of its own theatrical spectacle; it ironises the latter but without taking the form of a non-theatrical consciousness providing a discursive commentary. It does not cease to be theatre even as it negates it. A theatre company that aspires to the ecstatic in effect likewise aspires to the effacing of the activity of communication that sustains it as co-ordinated labour. Something that cannot be put into words is the result of words. In an arts organisation this is not bad faith so much as the concerted creation of a breathing space in the everyday. Collective make-believe that does not chafe at and overleap the limits of the readily intelligible never comes up against sociability in its difference from society as it currently exists. The elsewhere of the ecstatic is the Year Zero of a new beginning. By means of the ecstatic, Kosky is in a better position to do justice to the here and now of theatrical performance than the doctrinaire practitioners of postdramatic theatre. One might counter that Kosky uses the here and now of performance as means to an end whereas in postdramatic theatre the here and now of performance have been raised to an absolute value. But the irony of the concept that Hegel discerned in sense-certainty is on show in this elevation of presentness to a defining characteristic of postdramatic theatre: as the elevation occurs via conceptualisation, the very “nowness” of postdramatic theatre has turned into its opposite and become a generality. The valorisation of presentness involves a decision on what counts as present, a discrimination and exclusion. The minimalism is at odds with the individuation that differentiates a now from a concept. Properly speaking, the “nowness” of now emerges not through stripping back, but rather through grasping the now in

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all its historical thickness and futural openness. The exponents of postdramatic theatre cannot help conceptualising the now of theatre inasmuch as they strip away everything concrete that individuates a given now. The “now” by which they hope to take the measure of the immediacy of theatre is no more fit for this purpose than the “this” of sense-certainy, for, as Hegel observes, the actual individual thing existing in physical space “cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness” (1977, p. 66): a speaker can point to an object and refer to it by means of “this”, but the power of “this” to designate an individual object is not independent of the act of pointing. The words “here”, “this” and “now” betray whatever specific singularity they are used to name by virtue of the extension that makes them words at all. The demonstrative pronoun “this” flips over into the utmost abstractness because it can be applied to anything. The here and now of performance, once they are held to be authorised and validated by the theory of postdramatic theatre advanced by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Erika Fischer-Lichte, surrender their self-sufficient and singular immediacy to turn into instantiations of a concept. The here and now become, as it were, the stock in trade or clichés of postdramatic theatre. They are its repeatable signature, its tic: a new formalism intrudes that pushes the singularity of the here and now out of the picture. The avoidance of a playtext—should it be believed that improvisation is a short cut to the here and now—does not amount to a break with logocentrism if a theoretical text is taken to justify it. The true here and now of these performances are always elsewhere, in the domain of abstract rationalisations: the actual physical immediacy of these performances is turned into a cipher of the concept of the immediate. Thus when Lehmann proposes that the here and now are revelatory of what he calls postdramatic theatre and of its exemplarity as theatre, he sets it chasing after its own shadow: “In contrast to other arts, which produce an object and/or are communicated through media, here the aesthetic act itself (the performing) as well as the act of reception (the theatre going) take place as a real doing in the here and now” (2006, p. 17). To press a prior claim to the here and now, to make out that one has secure and exclusive possession of it is to settle for something that has already undergone a degree of conceptualisation. Writing on the new paradigm for theatre that she extracts from performance art, Fischer-Lichte notes a similar running after presence: Since the 1960s, theatre, action and performance artists have [. . .] based their performative experiments on a radical opposition of presence and representation, which allowed them to isolate and magnify the phenomenon of presence. The newly established genre of action and performance art did not only place itself, as already emphasized, against the commercialization of art but also vehemently opposed the theatre’s convention to depict as present fictive literary worlds and their characters. This form of theatre epitomized representation. Its presentness remained an “as if,” a pretense. The action and performance artists called for “real” presence. What occurred in an action or performance always really happened in the present—in real space and time, always hic et nunc (2008, p. 97).

Closed in upon themselves, the hic et nunc of performance art have more to do with mindfulness than with the kairos of messianism. For the now to become urgent,

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it must be wracked by another world, another future, another present—a coincidence that is also an incompossibility. To draw near to the here and now—that is to say, to dwell on the here and now in their difference from general concepts—requires a modus operandi that not only does not conceptualise the here and now, but furthermore approaches the here and now with an eye to what eludes conceptualisation. The ecstatic, because it is not a concept but rather an affect, because it is a class of entities whose unity is explained not by a common set of objective marks but rather by a subjective feeling of rapture, is the happy hunting-ground of the singular. By its ceremonialising of its own here and now, theatrical performance focuses attention on the singular’s condition of possibility: it is the site where a phenomenon can enter into an aggrandised ownership of the singularity that in any case is its by right of its occupying a determinate time and place. The ecstatic, as Kosky concedes, does not have to manifest itself there, but the circumstances are at least auspicious. The circumstances are auspicious because more of the body is on the line in live performance. At least this is the implication of Kosky’s rapturous account of Isolde’s euphoric address to Tristan’s corpse: Recordings do it no justice. You have to see the melody emerge from deep within the singer’s body. To hear the melody being born out of the singer’s mouth. To touch the melody as it travels through space. To smell the melody as it floats around you. To taste the melody as it submerges into your own body (2008, p. 86).

The audience member’s body is not outside the performance, even if it happens to be outside the depiction. Recognition of the ecstatic, because it involves consulting a feeling of pleasure rather than a general concept, lends itself to being described as a corporeal affair, a galvanising of the senses in their distinctness from intellection. But if it is simply heightened sensory activity that is sought after, then a live theatrical performance is a technologically crude answer to the question of the maximal engagement of the sensorium (the law-abiding citizen’s makeshift LSD). Kosky has the melody pass through all the senses, literally and not just figuratively. The synaesthesia is the condition of the ecstatic, yet inasmuch as it is also the criterion for recognising a given performance as ecstatic, it discriminates among the objects it judges. The subject is not here held hostage by the quantitative intensity of his or her sense impressions and cut off from the external world. The subjective basis on which the ecstatic is recognised does not convert into an indifference to the concrete determinations of phenomena. Ecstasy is a response to certain features and certain constellations of features that go unremarked by the judgment that subsumes the particular under its relevant concept on the grounds of its objective characteristics. There is an intrinsic sobriety immanent to ecstasy in its vigilant sifting of all the various permutations for the sake of a reoccurrence of the pleasure in which the condition of ecstasy recognises its external counterpart. An object is being pursued, but its appearance is unstable. This lack of an objective rule for what counts as ecstatic does not mean that everything must be found to be ecstatic, for the feeling of ecstasy discriminates in the absence and impossibility of a rule. The lack of a rule differs from the bare,

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mechanical flouting of rules: the latter cannot ensure the ecstatic as a theatrical phenomenon because it does not defer to the subjective authority of ecstasy as a psychical-physiological condition but is rather guided by the objectivity of the rules it inverts. Where there is nonetheless a profane antinomian messianism in Kosky’s theatre, it is when the arrival of the ecstatic not only shows up the nullity of a rule specific to it, but furthermore throws into question which rules henceforth are to apply at all—the ecstatic, which admits no rule, becomes the rule against which other rules are judged. For Kosky to propose the theatre as the perfect place for the ecstatic to manifest itself might seem to privilege the irrationality of an affect over the numerous other ends that have been and can be attributed to theatre. But the irrationality of the theatrical ecstatic is poorly understood if it is aligned with a refusal and denigration, a bare, mechanical flouting of conceptual thought, to the exclusion of witnessing, education, catharsis, the realisation of Spirit and the like. Ecstasy, as a response to a given performance, can pick out in the performance precisely that which bears witness, educates, relieves and realises. But it will pick it out in its singularity, for it is by its openness to the singularity of what is before it that it differentaties itself from conceptual thought. In this attention to the singularity of their own staging, Kosky’s productions do not efface themselves before the task of implementing the rules for performance of which a score or text is often uncritically taken to consist. The charge of infidelity to the original that has been entered against Kosky and Regietheater more broadly makes light of the “liberties” that every ostensibly by-the-numbers production inevitably takes: all manner of decisions have to be made for which the score or text contains no instruction and for which imagination is indispensable (Stanislavski 2008, p. 62). A by-the-numbers production is faithful usually less to the score or text than to prevailing performance conventions: it draws on these when the score or text is not forthcoming with advice on staging and if it thereby avoids a provocative display of imagination, it is not because the original shines through it. The charge of infidelity to the original, even when it is not simply a dishonest feeling of unease at bucked performance conventions, assumes that the score or text is a set of rules to be implemented and that the evaluation of a performance is consequently a matter of ticking off when and where these rules are observed or ignored. Once a score or text is equated with a set of rules and theatre reduced to the status of either an obedient or fractious servant, non-scripted theatre more readily appears to be the self-assertion of theatre, a coming into its own of the here and now of performance. Yet it is not obvious that the only way to view the relation between a score or text and its performance is as the implementation of rules. It cannot be taken for granted that the score or text looks to the performance solely as a deferential complement to itself, an instantiation in the here and now that subordinates its singularity to the revelation of the work “proper”. A work written for performance is a work that needs to be performed in order to be itself: it needs to be taken beyond itself in order to be what it is. To write for performance is to write with an eye to the open possibility of the ecstatic. A work written for performance always implies an invitation to manhandling.

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Kosky affirms as much when he says of Lohengrin: “In my Vienna production there was no shining armour, no boat and no swan. The opera is not really about those things” (2008, p. 69). According to an interview with John Allison, this Viennese production of Lohengrin turned out to be one of Kosky’s “unhappiest directorial experiences”: “The dramaturg warned me it was an anti-Semitic public, and they turned on me like a lynch mob. Admittedly, in the programme note I called Wagner an arsehole—though of course I don’t underestimate his genius” (2013, p. 1538). The cult of personality that certain directors and audiences harbour for a composer or dramatist can easily entrench the stupor that prevents the work from engaging with the present without giving up its distance from it. What a work written for performance is really about is uncovered by reading it against the grain, with a degree of violence in relation to the letter. Fidelity to the spirit of the work, even as it translates into evidence of hubris on the part of the director, is fidelity to the project that a performance and the work can undertake together in the openness of the here and now. What a work written for performance really is cannot be settled apart from its performance, which is to say that what it really is, its essence, is renegotiated and redefined with every production, every performance. The performance supplements the work, but not in the sense of completing it: it is the excess the work calls for, the otherness it wants sutured to itself. The work, in soliciting its performance, seeks to go beyond itself, to experience an ecstasy peculiar to it, an ecstasy of the artefact—a being outside of itself—that can nonetheless leave the assembled human practitioners and spectators wholly unmoved. And yet that the performance of a work can fall flat does not prove that this artefactual ecstasy is only ever immaterial to the psychical-physiological ecstasy by which a spectator, actor or director might happen to be assailed. Even if it is not a necessary condition of the affect, what it can contribute to its facilitation is not something that Kosky is prepared to discard. He does not opt for the self-contained now of the improvised theatrical event, preferring instead the tension between a production and the work from the past it stages. The present is taken out of itself through the intrusion of words, images and sounds from the past, just as the past in turn is stretched and reinvented through being invested in anachronistic flesh and technology. The transgression is enabling because it disconcerts preconceptions, weakening their hold and thereby giving the ecstatic its chance. The theatre, as a carnivalesque social space, is already predisposed to a relaxation of psychological defences, as Kosky maintains in his assessment of his early Viennese audiences: “they’ve forgotten that they’re allowed to open up, and that theatre and performance is a place where they can actually open up, where they can actually let themselves go” (2004, p. 24). The social conventions that govern theatrical space and that excuse audiences who let themselves go have not come into being out of thin air and equally cannot be expected to remain in place without their motivating grounds. The relative innocuousness of theatrical spectatorship as an activity and the customary non-identity of what is depicted with the means of its depiction (actors, props, etc.) are among the factors that help explain the relaxation of the theatregoer’s defences, but on their own they are not enough to bring about a manifestation of

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the ecstatic. The rules might momentarily loosen their grip, but the singular still needs to rise to the occasion and prompt pleasure’s intervention on its behalf against the rules under which the performance will otherwise be weighed and sorted. The work in being produced must enter the dimension of spectacle and make a show of its anarchic irreducibility to the norms that orient judgment in everyday life. Every work of art is an anachronism, even at the time of its first creation, since it is as art necessarily untimely in its divergence from the prevailing norms of everyday life. Overcoming anachronism is not the business of a staging, but setting anachronism to work is. Kosky’s revivals at the Komische Oper of the pre-Nazi era operettas by Oscar Straus and Paul Ábrahám are tributes to the Jewish theatrical history of the building that the company now occupies: the Metropol-Theater (architectural fragments of which survive in the Komische Oper) was only one of the more prominent Jewish-led houses in pre-war Berlin.2 Kosky’s operetta revivals are emblematic in general of how he conceives the relationship between the now of staging and the then of a work from the past. He approaches the task of producing texts and scores with the question not so much of how they might be made relevant to the present as of how they might help open up the present and carry it beyond itself. To revive a work does not mean here to dust it off and to affix a few topical garnishes from the oppressively small bundle of political issues, cultural references and design trends that passes for a synecdoche of the present. The present in this case is not the measure of the past; on the contrary, Kosky’s productions of two operettas from 1932—Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will! (Straus) and Ball im Savoy (Ábrahám)— held up the present for judgment and found it wanting insofar as they demonstrated how long Berlin’s post-war theatrical programming had remained captive to the racist motivations of Nazi censorship. In an interview with the conductor Adam Benzwi for the programme booklet accompanying Ball im Savoy, Kosky confesses: That since the premiere over 80 years ago no major theatre in Germany has put on a fullscale production is something I find astonishing and depressing. [. . .] The recordings of the post-war period largely “aryanised” this music. They took out the jazz and did with the music what the culture previously had done with the people: they “purified” this music of its Jewish elements, its jazz, its “queerness” and its Afro-American qualites (Benzwi 2013, pp. 7–8).

Of course the sanitisation carried out by these post-war recordings did not so much remove the grotesque altogether as reconfigure it. It became the shadow that the early productions threw over these recordings, for those who could remember them or who could simply conceive their possibility. A travesty need not grasp that it has fallen prey to one type of grotesqueness in its efforts to avoid another, for it can be shielded from the realisation by the depth of its conformism to the mores and objectives of the receiving culture.

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On reasons for Berlin’s relative openness to Jewish directors, see Rischbieter (1992), pp. 216–217. For a study of Berlin’s flourishing Jewish popular theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Sprengel (1997).

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The social combativeness that was a recurring ingredient in Kosky’s early Australian productions is not missing from his operetta revivals, but it has acquired a different cast. Insofar as the decision to perform these works in a full-blooded way is already to take a critical stand against the present, the stagings themselves can be left to do justice to the works’ whimsy. The superficiality here has a polemical edge: the sequined glitziness and the high-key lighting show up the soddenness of what long smothered it. To temper this superficiality with an on-stage acknowledgement of the works’ melancholy history would be to mourn its loss rather than to reassert it in its former vigour (the reassertion, it must be said, is at times constrained by a company chorus with the extensions and turnout of a toddler pretending to be a monster). Through his staging of these operettas Kosky returns a Jewishness to the German stage that is quite unlike the dismally sententious productions of G. E. Lessing’s Nathan der Weise with which, in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s dictatorship, numerous houses throughout the country hoped to extract from an Enlightenment text a response to Nazi genocide. It is a queer Jewishness, a grotesque Jewishness, with the “queer” and “grotesque” functioning here not as qualifiers that mark out a distance from Jewishness, but rather as indications of a distance and spaciousness within Jewishness, of an opening up of identity and of a theatricalising of the law. This undecidability, which is not to be confused with a straightforward disowning of an identity, rubs up against the messianic tradition with its mistrust of what is, while also declining to converge with it. In a 2020 interview with Nicholas Potter, Kosky stresses that he sees the Jewishness of the works he is reviving as inseparable from German culture: Part of my mission in the last ten years has been to convince the German audiences and artists that this is not Jewish music culture. This is not even Jewish-German culture. This was German culture. That’s very important, because it’s easy to engage with Jewish culture and feel sad and unhappy and say what happened was terrible. The audience sits there and feels guilt. But I’m not doing this as a guilt project for German audiences. I want to celebrate pieces for their greatness (Potter 2020).

Kosky accordingly does not see himself so much redefining German culture as reasserting the unmanageable complexity that the Nazis had spurned. The past here is an ally in the interrogation of the professed conservatism of nationalists with their bowdlerised histories as well as of the unavowed conservatism of presentists for whom an alternative to the current state of affairs is scarcely imaginable. To perform works from the past not only redeems them for the present, but also redeems them from their own present; it is to restore them to the transnational openness of their own age just as it is to insist upon an expansion to how we understand ours. As the openness of the theatrical now—and its affording of access to the singularity of the ecstatic—is a goal rather than a given, it has to be extricated from the prevailing perceptual and behavioural automatisms, and in Kosky’s campaign against the latter the determinacy that his source texts and scores inject into a production is of use as a countervailing power rather than simple proof of a tyranny of the past over the present. A work that is written for performance, that survives being consumed by a one-off performance, is a work that, in a sense, is written for no time and place in particular, an anywhere and an anywhen. But as the very generality

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of an anywhere and an anywhen are incompatible with performance, this is to deny that such a work is written for performance at all. In calling out for performance, the work cannot be said to be indifferent to which now and here it appears in. In being written for performance, it is what it is only with the addition of a given here and now in their singularity. It stands in need of the ecstatic to lift the singularity of the here and now into the performance itself. In this light, the ecstatic realises the work, even if from other vantage points it runs amok with the letter as well as with audiences’ expectations with respect to what constitutes a faithful production. The ecstatic, because it is the surprise for which the work prepares without pre-empting it, is in effect a point of resistance internal to the work. It can assume the cast of a critical question that the work puts to itself. The staging can be lurid and grotesque, from the small-scale intervention of Melita Jurisic’s rapper’s grill in Poppea to the large-scale feathered commotion and synthetic phantasmagoria of Kiss Me, Kate and The Lost Echo, but Kosky’s productions thereby inveigle out into the open something that cannot be ruled alien to the source texts themselves. What these works have to say about gender relations, the inscrutability of the divine and the squalor of power cannot be said once and for all, just as to bear repeating, to overcome repetition in the singularity of performance, what they have to say requires translation into the ecstatic.

References Adorno, T. W. (1999). Bourgeois Opera, trans. David J. Levin and Rodney Livingstone. In T. W. Adorno, Sound Figures (pp. 15–28). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adorno, T. W. (2005). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso. Allison, J. (2013). Barrie Kosky. Opera, 12, 1530–1538. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benzwi, A., & Kosky, B. (2013). Sinfonie einer Großstadt: Programme Booklet for Ball im Savoy. Komische Oper Berlin. Connor, M. (2008). On the Importance of Being Kosky. Quadrant, 1 December. Croggon, A. (2010). Two Innovative Australian Directors. Theatre Forum, 37, 3–12. Crosby, R. B. (2020). On the Rhetorical Grotesque: A Mode for Strange Times. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 50, 109–123. Fensham, R. (2009). Smell-Bodies: Tragic Masculinity in a Postcolonial King Lear. In R. Fensham, To Watch Theatre: Essays on Genre and Corporeality (pp. 73–103). Bern: Peter Lang. Fingesten, P. (1984). Delimitating the Concept of the Grotesque. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42, 419–426. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. Abingdon: Routledge. Flögel, K. F. (1778). Geschichte des Groteskekomischen. Liegnitz: Siegert. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horace. (1929). Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Hugo, V. (1909). “Preface” to Cromwell. Trans. George Burnham Ives. In Vol. 3 of The Works of Victor Hugo (pp. 3–54). Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company. Kayser, W. (1981). The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. New York: Columbia University Press. Kosky, B. (2004). Hello Wien! Australasian Drama Studies, 44, 17–35. Kosky, B. (2008). On Ecstasy. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Lehmann, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon: Routledge. Macaulay, A. (2003). Barrie Kosky. In A. Macaulay, Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: Directors Talk about Acting (pp. 1–22). Sydney: Currency Press. Potter, N. (2020). Komische Oper’s Barrie Kosky on Weimar Radicalism. Exberliner, 17 February. Rischbieter, H. (1992). Theater als Kunst und als Geschäft: Über jüdische Theaterregisseure und Theaterdirektoren in Berlin 1894-1933. In H.-P. Bayerdörfer, Theatralia Judaica: Emanzipation und Antisemitismus der Theatergeschichte von der Lessing-Zeit bis zur Shoah (pp. 205–217). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Sprengel, P. (1997). Populäres Jüdisches Theater. Berlin: Haude und Spener. Stanislavski, K. (2008). An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary. Trans. Jean Benedetti. Abingdon: Routledge. Teresa of Ávila. (1988). The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford University Press 2005), The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford University Press 2007) and Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle (Oxford University Press 2019) as well as the editor of Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (Stanford University Press 2008).

Chapter 8

“Es klang so alt und war doch so neu”: Barrie Kosky and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Michael J. Halliwell

Abstract Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been, and remains one of the most controversial works in the operatic canon. A new production by Barrie Kosky, the Jewish-Australian director of the Komische Oper Berlin, was premiered to great acclaim at Bayreuth in 2017 and repeated in 2018 and 2019. This chapter investigates how Kosky has confronted the dark legacy of this monumental work, interrogating many of the deeply disturbing elements while finding a way to strikingly dramatize these fault lines in the opera. His production achieves a profound vision of the role of art in a deeply politicized society; one distrustful of the “other”, and constantly seeking scapegoats. While the Nazi past looms large over this production—some of it set in a Nuremberg courtroom with Sachs/Wagner in the dock—it also unflinchingly, and often darkly comically, addresses contemporary political and social issues. Kosky’s production is contrasted with Katharina Wagner’s highly controversial 2010 Bayreuth version which starkly divided the critics, but which offers a very different, and equally fascinating perspective.

Die Meistersinger is full of breathtakingly gorgeous music. It is full of heartbreaking moments of beauty and melancholy. It is full of genuine and authentic expressions of life and joy and happiness. But it is also troubled and troubling. It just depends who you are in the piece and who you are in the audience (Kosky 2017, p. 44).

Background Barrie Kosky’s production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was greeted with much enthusiasm and acclaim when premiered at Bayreuth in 2017. The event was surrounded by considerable hype, including the fact that Kosky was the first foreigner and indeed the first non-member of the extended Wagner family to M. J. Halliwell (*) The University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_8

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direct Die Meistersinger at the Festival.1 Apparently, it was also the first production directed by someone of Jewish background. The anticipation was heightened by Kosky’s international reputation for a directorial style that extends the boundaries of the art form, often confronting and surrounded by controversy. All suggested that this new production would be anything but a comfortable recreation of “alt Nürnberg”. In tandem with a discussion of Kosky’s production, it is interesting to consider another significant earlier production of Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth: Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner’s production from 2007. This staging probably excited as much, if not more, controversy than Kosky’s, for as wide a variety of often extraneous reasons. One might argue that it was the way in which her production engaged with the opera, as well as the heated polemic surrounding its reception, which paved the way for Kosky’s production. Katharina Wagner is now the director of the Festival. As Barry Millington (2007, p. 266) notes, “the entire idea of interpretation in opera is a comparatively recent phenomenon”, but a sense of an “ideal” production of every opera has accompanied it from the start. He observes the “notion of provisionality” that was Wagner’s concept of The Ring where the score would be burned after the first series of performances; however, this idea “should be set against the aura of monumentality and immutability that surrounded the Ring and other works of Wagner, particularly after his death” (Millington 2007, p. 266). For many years this was the case for Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth, but Katharina Wagner’s and Kosky’s productions have irrevocably changed this. Stephen McClatchie (2008, p. 137) suggests that Die Meistersinger helped to construct the German nation during the 1860s and 1870s: “In its attempt to forge collective memory, it . . . functioned in a sense like a public festival, as depicted on stage in its own culminating scene. The national identity that it helped to shape continued to be developed through the Nazi era”. From the outset the opera was regarded by many as embodying important elements of German national identity; Die Meistersinger has been a potent touchstone for the polemic surrounding Wagner from his own time to the present. Robert Sollich (2007, p. 18) observes that whereas all of Wagner’s other stage works “entered the repertory only with difficulty and in the face of initial reserve and even fierce resistance. . . Die Meistersinger immediately became a favourite with the audiences”. In its apparent celebration of “German” art it has been misused and abused by many opera managements and directors, not the least, of course, during the Third Reich, where, once in power, the Nazis “treated themselves to a Meistersinger binge” (Dennis 2002, p. 107). When one looks back over its production history, it is difficult to imagine that it was originally intended to be a comic opera—a satyr play accompanying a tragedy—in this case, Tannhäuser. It is Wagner’s longest single opera; the cultural, philosophical and political weight it has had to bear over the years since its premiere in Munich in 1868 is immense.

1

Kosky obtained German citizenship the following year.

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More than any of Wagner’s other operas, it was employed by the Nazis as an important component of the regime’s ideology and propaganda. Bayreuth became a focus of German right-wing opposition towards the Weimar Republic and Hitler was a frequent visitor. When the Festival reopened in 1924, Die Meistersinger was performed with Wagner’s widow, the 86-year-old Cosima Wagner, present. It opened the 1933 Festival immediately after the Nazi advent to power, and was a live broadcast accompanied by a radio address by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who claimed the opera encapsulated all the current spiritual struggles of the German people. Goebbels described it as the “incarnation of [German] national identity”, inspiring the “German cultural soul . . . a brilliant compendium of German melancholy and romanticism, of German pride and German energy” (Spotts 1994, p. 173). Hitler designated it as the official work to open the Nuremberg rallies from 1935, and the staging, particularly in the final scene, often resembled these rallies. During the war Bayreuth was much reduced in scope, but was kept open to stage a limited festival: Die Meistersinger was the only new production. Hitler claimed to have seen the opera over a hundred times but visited the festival only once during the war—a performance of Götterdämmerung, appropriately enough.2 Somewhat surprisingly, Die Meistersinger was one of the operas used to revive the Bayreuth Festival after the war. Vaszonyi (2002, p. 15) suggest that this was “both conservative and daring. It was a gesture of stubborn denial but also of stubborn determination to carry on and ‘reclaim’ that which had been seized and transformed”.3 However, Wagner’s grandson Wieland tried to purge Die Meistersinger of its Nazi accretions, so much so that his production was dubbed “Die Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg” (The Mastersingers without Nuremberg). Frederic Spotts (1994, p. 238), writing about Wieland in his classic study of the history of Bayreuth, observes that the scrapping of the old interpretations was ultimately a purging of [Wieland’s] own past and of Bayreuth’s past. Expunging history was a deep psychological and artistic need for him. His aim was to create a new Bayreuth—and even a new Wagner—free of the old Germanness with its nationalism and sentimentality . . . the liberation of Wagner’s music from its association with the Third Reich and a demonstration of its timelessness and universality.4

Martin Geck (2013, p. 272) asserts that there are only really two interpretive approaches to the work.5 The first requires an acceptance of the opera as Wagner’s “profession of faith in a life-affirming art meaningfully embedded in real-life 2

See Millington (1991). Hohendahl (1993: 39) notes that the 1951 production by Rudolf Hartman used much from the 1943 Heinz Tietjen production “as if the defeat had never occurred.” 4 Spotts (1994, p. 225) notes of Wieland’s later 1963 production that if the earlier production “portrayed Mastersingers without Nuremberg, this version lacked both Nuremberg and Mastersingers”. The production elicited the most vehement booing the Festival had ever experienced and was seen by some as Wieland’s most revolutionary production. 5 Marc A. Weiner (1996, p. 54) argues that Wagner scholarship in general “has been divided, often vituperatively, into two camps: those who wish to defend the Master’s works from the taint of antisemitism, and those who seek to read the music dramas as intimately, ideologically linked to the 3

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society”. The second recognizes that Wagner’s true picture of the world means that he “constantly undercuts his own optimistic conception of Die Meistersinger; with the exception of his rebellious revolutionary period he always doubted that life and art could be balanced” (Geck 2013, p. 272). The result is that “as soon as we seek to fathom the underlying message of the opera, rather than glossing it over, we shall stumble upon inconsistencies” (Geck 2013, p. 273).

Is Beckmesser Jewish? A central issue surrounding Die Meistersinger is to what extent Wagner’s notorious antisemitism is embedded in the opera, and particularly in the figure of Beckmesser, both issues crucial to any discussion of Kosky’s production.6 Wagner’s early, anonymously-published essay, Das Judentum in der Musik (1850), was republished in 1869 under his own name, one year after the premiere of the opera, so it would seem that the issue of antisemitism was in his mind at the time.7 Theodor Adorno (2005, p. 13), writing in 1938—and thus before the full horrors of the Third Reich emerged—famously observed: “all the rejects of Wagner’s works are caricatures of Jews”, including “the impotent intellectual critic Hanslick-Beckmesser. They stir up the oldest sources of the German hatred of Jews”.8 However, it appears that explicitly anti-Jewish interpretations did not occur in the staging in Wagner’s time, and, perhaps more surprisingly, even during the Nazi period. Geck (2013, p. 287) argues: “it would have made no sense in the context of the plot of the opera to have made Beckmesser—highly regarded in Nuremberg through his office as town clerk—a Jew.”

racism reflected in the diverse documents of the composer’s biography . . . and in his overtly antisemitic essays”. 6 Thomas S. Grey (2008, p. 203), regarding Wagner’s antisemitism, suggests that the “real question has to do with the consequences of these facts, either for our understanding of the operas or for any possible consensus regarding Wagner‘s implication in the murderous anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime that came to power in Germany fifty years after his death.” 7 Grey (2008, p. 212) observes: “Wagner’s decision to identify himself as the author of Judaism in Music is important . . . since it could then be regarded as a key to such potential readings for anyone with a desire to use it so. Nearly all modern interpretations of anti-Semitic content in the operas refer to this key, although we still have very little evidence of whether or not Wagner‘s contemporaries chose to avail themselves of it.” 8 This is a viewpoint that Barrie Kosky articulates in his account of the genesis of his production. Adorno’s discussion of antisemitic elements in the operas significantly influenced later perspectives on Wagner’s antisemitism: “the gold-grubbing, invisible, anonymous, exploitative Alberich, the shoulder-shrugging, loquacious Mime, overflowing with self-praise and spite, the impotent intellectual critic Hanslick-Beckmesser” (Adorno 2005, pp. 12–13). Thomas S. Grey (2002, p. 178) rather disparagingly describes Adorno as “in a certain paradoxical way, himself sometimes com[ing] across as a kind of high-modernist Beckmesser”.

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However, this is certainly not to say that the ways characters were perceived by audiences from Wagner’s time onwards have been free of antisemitic connotations. Dennis (2002, p. 101) poses the question in these terms: the crucial question is not whether Hitler and his immediate followers perceived Wagner’s opera as anti-Jewish, but whether the music and text of Die Meistersinger were effectively implemented to indoctrinate Germans with antisemitic ideology. Is there proof that the opera itself was explicitly used to motivate actions against Jews, or, more broadly, to create a cultural atmosphere that encouraged people to do so?

As Grey (2008, p. 16) suggests, “if Wagner had really intended subtexts of antiSemitic caricature and allegory in the music dramas, it is indeed difficult to explain the absence of any references to such subtexts in the extensive private record of his thoughts and opinions, a record not otherwise lacking in candor. Could it be that the ‘conspiracy of silence’ started at home?” He concludes that “if Wagner influenced the tragic course of German anti-Semitism in the generations to follow, it was through his prominence as a public figure, indeed as a famous artist and composer, but not through the music he composed” (Grey 2008, p. 218). Grey’s argument appears persuasive, but is certainly not uncontested. David J. Levin (1996, p. 129) argues that the mark of the Jew in Wagner’s works is in the end less physiognomical, social, or musical (although it is these things too) than it is aesthetic . . . Jews in Wagner’s works are dogged by aesthetic qualities that the composer loathed. As the carriers of those qualities, Wagner seems to introduce Jews in order to expel them. For in thus dispensing with them, Wagner’s works also dispense with the aesthetic qualities that they embody.

Kosky’s production presents, particularly through the character of Beckmesser, what can be seen as an antisemitic subtext at the heart of the opera: Beckmesser is ritualistically humiliated almost to the point of being completely destroyed, and is expelled at the end of the opera. This often heated debate surrounding the work shows no sign of diminishing; there is an important perspective which argues that we have lost sight of some of the antisemitic tropes that would have been immediately apparent to earlier generations and to ignore these issues is not really a solution. Weiner (1995, p. 2) notes how changing expectations have “led to a wide-spread disavowal of precisely the racist and exclusionary dimension of [Wagner’s] essays and music dramas that would have been so obvious to a nineteenth-century audience”. Slavoj Žižek (2005, pp. xiii–xiv) argues that Wagner “is mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in his epoch: when a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes nervous gestures, and so forth, ‘everyone knew’ this to be a Jew . . . the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew itself is not a direct ultimate referent, but is already encoded, a cipher of ideological and social antagonisms”. Yet Dennis has trawled through an exhaustive list of material that might shed light on the issue and has been unable to find evidence “that Nazi cultural politicians, or their folkish forbears and associates, referred in public discourse to the character of Sixtus Beckmesser as Jewish, or to his fate in Die Meistersinger as foreshadowing National Socialist policies against the Jews” (2002, p. 113).

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Like much of the polemic surrounding the opera, it is impossible to decide with absolute assurance on this issue, but what seems reasonable to conclude is that Beckmesser embodied certain negative traits that Wagner personally probably viewed as stereotypically “Jewish”, but that there was no deliberate intention to impose highly offensive caricatures in the opera that might detract from the contemporary reception of the work: Wagner intended the work to have as wide an appeal as possible, and not to be received as crudely propagandistic. Hans Vaget (2002, pp. 202–203) points out the danger that extreme and polarised views of the subject can lead to the perspective that “all accounts of the opera, on stage or in theoretical analysis, are incomplete, or invalid, if they do not foreground the implied Jewishness of Wagner’s comic protagonist”.9 He suggests that in viewing the history of the opera in Germany, with its “entanglements in the political agendas of most diverse regimes”, it appears that antisemitism “was not a major, let alone a determining factor in [the opera’s] political appropriation—not even in the Third Reich”, for the Nazis understood that it would be “a mistake to use Wagner’s highly auratic art for propaganda in a crude sense, for it might then lose its irreplaceable value for the ubiquitous aestheticisation of political life” (Vaget 2002, pp. 205–206).10 Like most great and enduring works of art, the opera has proven to be a vehicle for an increasingly wide range of interpretive approaches to the staging, resembling what Robert Sollich (2007, p. 24) sees in the work, as the image of a palimpsest that represents the score before the history of the work’s reception began to leave its mark on it. The different elements which the observer can identify have always provided the widest possible scope for interpretation and as a result have turned the production history of the opera into a puzzle in which competing political and aesthetic ideas have had no difficulty in claiming Die Meistersinger for themselves.

The opera thus becomes a reflection of the present as well as of changing political and cultural currents of the past.

Vaget (2002, p. 203) argues that the way in which Beckmesser is employed in the opera is as “the enemy of the new music, the ‘music of the future’: first, through his reaction to Walther’s Trial Song, then through his own serenade, and finally through his botched rendition of the Prize Song. How could this not evoke—over the heads of the protagonists on stage—associations with the most articulate critic of Wagner’s music, Eduard Hanslick, whom the composer, in the 1869 printing of Das Judentum in der Musik, pointedly, though not quite correctly, took to be Jewish?. . . .Like most ambitious creators, Wagner aspired to broad, even universal acceptance, and therefore took pains to keep any overt indication of his very particular anti-Jewish obsession out of his operatic work. By and large he succeeded in this. In two instances, however, with Beckmesser and Mime in Acts I and II of Siegfried, he was unable or unwilling to mask completely the affinity of his portrayals to his publicised views on Jewry”. 10 However, several productions of the opera during the Third Reich portrayed the Festwiese scene in Act 3 as versions of the Nuremberg rallies. Hohendahl (1993, p. 59) observes that through “their closeness to the party rallies, Bayreuth productions between 1933–1945 underscored the fateful appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich. At the center of this claim, we find a radical extension of the aesthetic into the political realm. It is significant that Goebbels defined the identity of the new Germany in terms of its art. ‘All great art is rooted in the people. When it loses its connection with the people, the development of a bloodless artificial virtuosity is inevitable.’” 9

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Staging Die Meistersinger How, then, do you solve the “problem” of Die Meistersinger? In terms of the actual stage history of the opera, Patrick Carnegie claimed in 1994 (p. 135) that the “palpable sixteenth-century source material of Die Meistersinger has set it apart from Wagner’s more myth-based operas, placing it in a backwater relatively untroubled by the attentions of ‘producers’ opera’”. This is a sweeping generalization. Certainly, in the more than two decades since Carnegie’s observation this has changed dramatically: the opera has been the focus of a wide variety of approaches to its interpretation and staging. One of the most confronting, directed by Peter Konwitschny in Hamburg in 2002, has Sachs’s oration on German Art in Act Three interrupted by members of the cast who exclaim that what Sachs is saying cannot be said any more, all leading to an interpolated discussion on what the word “German” actually means. Some of the final images are of a Nuremberg devasted by the bombing in World War II. David Levin (1997, pp. 51–52) notes two kinds of readings in terms of operatic staging in general: strong and weak. A strong reading is one which “accounts for the most meaning of a given text”; it is “surprising, illuminating previously invisible points in the text and thus asserting some distance from prevailing and predictable accounts” (Levin 1997, p. 51).11 He argues that a “weak” reading “tends to embrace a prevailing understanding of the work’s meaning, often seeking to reproduce the work’s prevailing aesthetic identity, often presenting itself as a non-reading, one that does not consciously venture an interpretation but instead merely seeks to present the work in its most familiar form” (Levin 1997, p. 52). Die Meistersinger has very broadly been a site of struggle between a “traditional” approach by directors who emphasise the celebratory aspects of the work, and those who use the opera to interrogate a variety of political, social and cultural issues of both the past and the present. Carnegie (1994, p. 150) suggests that productions “endeavouring to soften the impact of history by framing Die Meistersinger in the time of its composition—with or without irony or deflationary humour—have not been frequent. The more usual strategy for neutralising nationalist sentiment in the work has been to opt for anti-historical, quasi-abstract settings”. The opera might be seen as “an allegory of changes in society; about how society reacts to change and how much change it can accept” (Carnegie 1994, p. 150). It is also Wagner’s most self-reflexive work with its concern with the “mediated nature of art, its production and performance” (Berry 2018, p. 459).12 As Mark Berry (2018, p. 459) notes, the

Mark Berry (2018, p. 454) notes that Wagner “more or less invented the role of the modern opera Regisseur—Wagner was, almost irrespective of intention, perhaps the single most important godfather to a critical, modernist tradition of staging and interpretation that has been unavoidably, if problematically, linked to the word Regietheater (director’s theatre)”. 12 Ulrich Lenz (2017: 47) notes the opera’s investigation of ideas about art “to create a work which was unique even among his own career, the most German, and, at the same time, most selfreferential of all his operas.” 11

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opera’s “deliberate anachronisms pave the way for . . . playing with history and with its retelling, rewriting, relistening”, while conductor Pierre Boulez (Berry 2008) argues that Wagner’s music “has nothing to do with the historical truth about the town of Nuremberg. That is why I feel really ill at ease when people try to depict the historical town on the stage when it is absent in the music”. Kosky (2017, p. 43) describes the city as “built not with bricks and wood but with crotchets and quavers. It is a city spun out of song, made out of an architecture of echoes”. McClatchie (2008, p. 135) notes that “the work itself ‘performs’ the identity of its author’s nation. Significantly, the work itself thematizes performance and many of its phenomenal performances contribute, in turn, to the sense of the opera as a ‘performance’ of national identity”. Most productions of Richard Wagner’s operas at Bayreuth strove to retain as many elements from his time as possible, while this conservatism only began to dissipate in the 1920s but was halted by the advent of the Nazi regime. This changed when innovatory productions after World War II became the norm. Conductor Daniel Barenboim (1998, p. 14) observes that Bayreuth, “from 1876 until the Second World War, was the most conservative, narrow-minded theater in the whole world . . . Since 1951, Bayreuth has become exactly the opposite of what it was before, a place where everything is rethought, a place where all the productions are made to coincide with the ideas of the people who stage them”. However, Die Meistersinger has not had radical productions at Bayreuth compared to versions of the opera staged elsewhere, hence the heat surrounding Katharina Wagner’s production which might be seen to have absorbed some of the potential controversy that could have been later directed at Kosky. Both these productions contain a wealth of detail impossible to fully describe in this essay.13 So how does Beckmesser emerge in these productions?

Katharina Wagner Katharina Wagner’s production primarily highlights the repressive nature of Nuremberg society. She admits that her approach to the opera was to rethink the work in terms of its history at Bayreuth: “a full historic connection was never made—the handling of the work by the Nazis always successfully blanked out” (Wagner 2009, n.p.). Beckmesser—“Beck” as he self-designates himself on his T-shirt—is portrayed as an artistic revolutionary, in stark contrast with both Sachs and Walther who, during the course of the production, become very much part of the establishment. This is an intensely conservative society, obsessively bound to familiar routines and traditions, while visually the production is reminiscent of the German

13

Close readings of the details of Kosky’s production can be found in the following chapter by John Severn, which is designed as a companion to this chapter.

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Democratic Republic in the 1950s: a portrayal of a deeply de-romanticized “Nuremberg”.14 The characters are dressed in similar, drably conservative clothes and identical wigs and shoes, de-emphasizing any individuality, while their movements are almost ritualistic, following well-worn, habitual patterns. The opening scene in the church occurs in a characterless, bleakly secular art institution. The contrast visually between Walther in his flamboyant street clothes and the mastersingers and general public is extreme, and reflects their opposing artistic impulses. Sollich (2007, p. 20) notes that “the two sources from which Walther claims to derive his artistry— his private study of ancient texts and his intuitive tendency to seek inspiration in nature—are in fundamental conflict with the scholastic notions of Nuremberg’s Mastersingers and, indeed, represent a total reversal of their values”. Large grotesque puppets of German masters including Goethe, Schiller, Dürer, Beethoven and many others, including Wagner himself, weave throughout the action, and are seen engaged in very mundane activities, undermining and demystifying their elevated cultural status.15 Hers is a highly critical perspective: as a reviewer summed it up, “she has decided to take on Die Meistersinger’s Nachleben [afterlife] as well as the creation itself” (Miller 2010). Similarly, Per-Erik Skramstad (2010) observes that her version “emerges as a veritable revolt against her parents’ generation, their suppression of the Nazi past, and of her father’s trivial, nonsense productions of this opera at Bayreuth”. It is also an attack on the conservatism that has been so prevalent during the history of the opera at the Bayreuth Festival as well as in the wider world. Her production depicts a form of conservative brotherhood where mastersingers sit around a table, reading the ubiquitous small yellow books of German classics published by Reclam, which seem to contain the repository of the Mastersinger rules. Sachs appears initially barefoot, a transgressive, outsider figure. Walther, colourfully dressed, is a painter but carries a cello which, rather than playing, he proceeds to daub with paint. He is contrasted with Beckmesser as he is seen assembling a disordered and jumbled puzzle of Nuremberg compared to Beckmesser’s perfectly completed one. But in Act Three there is a profound reversal with Sachs now becoming a pillar of the establishment, as does Walther, while Beckmesser evolves into an innovative, misunderstood and unappreciated artist.16

Lutz Koepnick (2002, p. 73) argues that Richard Wagner’s Nuremberg “is a dreamt one, a chimera of the nineteenth-century imagination deeply affected by the course of German history after 1848 and prior to unification in 1870/1871”, while Peter U. Hohendahl (1993, p. 57) observes that Nuremberg “derives its meaning precisely from the confrontation between past and present, between medieval community and modern industrial society”. 15 Kosky also uses large puppets, but they are terrifying images of Nazi Jewish stereotypes. 16 Katharina Wagner (2009) argues that she was “constantly visualising two lines which cross at one point and then move apart again. Sachs develops from a free and lateral thinker to an adapted Boeotian. With Beckmesser it is the total opposite. He is searching for his own artistic release from the conventions in the intentional new interpretation of the award song in the third Act—and finds it”. 14

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Beckmesser is contrasted with Walther who is portrayed as a “Schlagerstar” (popstar), receiving a kitsch trophy, similar to the Bambi prize, Germany’s most prestigious media award, as well as a cheque from the “Nürnberger Bank” after his successful performance of the “Prize Song”.17 In a sense, Beckmesser takes on the role that Walther seemed to have the potential for in Act One when he sang the “Trial Song” which has seemingly more innovatory potential than his rather conventional “Prize Song”.18 Despite his protestations at being made a “Meister” at the end of the opera, Walther embraces the bourgeois and middle-class prospects that marriage to Eva indicates, which incorporates his full acceptance into the bourgeois society. Beckmesser, as a creative artist, reflects the many references in the opera to Paradise, including, of course, the character Eva (Eve). This is most potently depicted as a primal act of creation when, in the final act as he sings his song, he forms a human male body from a heap of clay and then extracts a female from the ribs of the male. Walter Bernhart (2015, p. 452) notes that “the sensational transformation of the chief artist-protagonists is the main element of artistic self-reflection” in this production which Katharina Wagner turns into an “updated twenty-first century discourse on art”. In many ways, this final depiction of Beckmesser is the most radical element in this production, in which he becomes a “hero of ‘entartete Kunst’ [degenerate art] who has to flee to avoid being persecuted” (Skramstad 2010).19 Beckmesser’s final moments on stage present problems for all directors in terms of staging. The stage direction is ambiguous: “Er stürzt wütend fort und verliert sich unter dem Volk” (He rushes off furiously and loses himself in the crowd). One way is to present this as “an ominous prelude to the Holocaust”, with the view that the opera should be seen as an analogue to Wagner’s antisemitism, while another possibility is a form of reconciliation between Sachs and Beckmesser in which he is “neither marginalised nor expelled, for Nuremberg ‘needs him’” (Vaget 2002, p. 204). In many ways, this latter strategy has become the norm. Vaget (2002, p. 205) maintains that many productions suggest that Beckmesser’s “future” consists of his ceasing to be a “Merker” (artistic judge) of the Guild, “but he will not cease to exist as a person, and he will remain a fully accepted member of the citizenry of Nuremberg”.20 The overriding impression of Katharina Wagner’s production is of the way in which she problematizes these conflicting views of Beckmesser, and while not necessarily explicitly highlighting the antisemitic subtext of the opera, Beckmesser’s outsider status at the end is ominously apparent. He is seen as the most

The German term “Schlagerstar” carries more negative connonations than the English equivalent. See Geck (2013), p. 265. 19 Bernhart (2015, p. 453) argues that “the three artist-protagonists, who in Act I appear in updated twenty-first-century versions of Wagner’s roles as artists, undergo a radical change in the course of the opera”. 20 David J. Levin (1996, p. 146) has a profoundly different view of Beckmesser at the end which is the “culmination of his ghettoization”; he is left among the people “in order to be left out; or we might say that he is kept among them in order to assume his place below them”. 17 18

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innovative and forward-looking of the masters; because of this, the conservative mastersinger guild and the townspeople must reject him.21 Kosky has some equivalent elements in his conception of the work—how can it be otherwise in this opera?—but his main focus is on the political, rather than the artistic, although, of course, these two elements are inextricably intertwined. While the critical reaction to Katharina Wagner’s production at the time, and for subsequent restagings, was mainly hostile, there seems to have been a recent re-evaluation of its importance. If there is anything approaching a critical consensus regarding this confronting and highly controversial production, it is that the final thirty minutes are a triumph.

Barrie Kosky Puts Wagner on Trial Kosky was reluctant to take on the opera, as he observes, until he reconsidered his views on what it was “about”, deciding that it was not primarily focused on German culture or ideology, because Wagner’s idea about German historical time and fact was “pure fantasy . . . . Once I made the decision that I didn’t have to have the weight of German history, identity and culture on my shoulders, and that I could look at everything through Wagner’s eyes and Wagner’s distorted, contradictory, frustratingly complex genius, it opened up all these possibilities” (Goldman 2017).22 Kosky notes in his essay in the 2017 Bayreuth programme book (p. 42), the “hidden trove of meanings” in Wagner’s stage directions, “none more so than the two contrasting stage directions” for “the disappearance and appearance of two of the opera’s main characters”—Beckmesser and Walther—“so one man disappears into the crowd whilst another steps out of it”. Kosky (2017, p. 42) interrogates the notion of the crowd—the Volk—posing the question: “who is this Volk”, particularly in the twenty-first century. He finds a clue “behind the walls of Wahnfried”, Wagner’s Bayreuth villa, which was Wagner’s attempt to “create a home-grown paradise, sheltered from the trials, tribulations and judgements of the real world . . . A Garden of Eden, fecund not with lush forests and plants but with silk fabrics and perfumes” (2017, p. 42). In effect, Kosky argues that Nuremberg in the opera for Wagner “is not a real space” but is “woven from his desire and need to create a paradise on earth”; Nuremberg is “a city where the psyche of the individual meets the psyche of the nation” (Kosky 2017, p. 43). Kosky states that “Wagner did not put Jews onstage . . . Beckmesser is not a Jew. Wagner’s too clever for that”, but he is a figure “marinated in the juices of

21

Very disturbing are the actions of Sachs at the end when a stage director and conductor are put into a coffin by Sachs’s assistants and set on fire by Sachs, evoking images of the Nazi era. 22 Kosky initially rejected Katharina Wagner’s offer to direct the opera at Bayreuth, but agreed six months later (Goldman 2017).

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nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, and consciously and unconsciously Wagner and his audience knew that” (2017, p. 44). He sees the character as a Frankenstein creature sewn together from all the bits and pieces that Wagner hated: the French, the Italians, the critics, the Jews. You name it, Wagner hated it and it all ends up in Beckmesser . . . his soul and character are marinated in every anti-Semitic prejudice that emanated from the blood libels of medieval Europe: he is a thief, he is greedy, he can’t love, he can’t understand true art, he steals German women, he steals German culture, he steals German music (Kosky 2017, p. 44).23

Kosky (2017, p. 44) regards Wagner’s greatest animus as being reserved for assimilated Jews who were “poisoning German culture from within”. Wagner “transforms the medieval blood libel and reinvents it into a nineteenth-century music libel. Jews used to drink the blood of Christian children but now they drink the blood of German culture” (Kosky 2017, p. 44). Strong stuff! Kosky sets the opening in the library in Wahnfried on August 13, 1875, commencing at 12.45 pm with an outside temperature of 23  C; Wagner’s wife Cosima lies in bed with a migraine and Wagner is out with his dogs; all this is accompanied by much chuckling from the audience. This superfluously detailed information, which is projected onto the stage set, has the effect of poking fun at the pretentiousness of what follows. There is an irony in that this almost manic depiction of information and detail is in profound contrast to the defining style of the first productions in the early 1950s by Wieland Wagner which have been described as “a circular acting area, the use of light to link music to movement and colour, the simplification of costumes without any suggestion of a specific time or place, the transformation of characters from pseudo-human beings into symbols and the stripping away of sets and gestures inessential to the conceptual core of the work” (Spotts 1994, p. 216). Wahnfried is, of course, a shrine to Wagner, so is not that far removed from the opening of the opera in Nuremberg’s St Katherine’s Church! Because of the wide-ranging polemic surrounding the opera, what is sometimes overlooked is the profound element of self-reflexivity in the work.24 Kosky emphasizes the

23 Thomas S. Grey (2002, pp. 180–181) identifies several elements that critics have used to argue the case for Beckmesser as an antisemitic caricature: “(1) the nervous, disjunct, and irascible qualities of Beckmesser’s vocal lines; (2) the emphasis on notes ‘unnaturally’ high for the prescribed bass voice . . . meant to suggest a querulous cracking of the voice; (3) the prosodic abuses and melodic poverty of his abortive ‘serenade’ in Act II; (4) its awkward decorative melismas, thought to mirror Wagner’s tendentious description of ‘cantorial singing’. . .; (5) Beckmesser’s ludicrous garbling of Walther’s poetry, further distorted by its mismatching to the tattered shreds of his own failed serenade (again, an allegory of the Jews’ alleged inability to understand truly the languages of their ‘host’ cultures from within).” 24 As Geck (2013, pp. 277–278) observes: “Die Meistersinger may be regarded from start to finish as an opera about music. That it features an ongoing discussion about the ideological element of ‘German art’ tends to obscure that it is German music that is, as it were, the work’s invisible leading lady. The number of occasions when music is presented onstage speaks for itself . . . Indeed, the action of the first act as a whole is largely laid out along the lines of a discussion about music ... In short, around a third of the opera is taken up with scenes in which the plot requires singing in the

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meta-theatrical aspect of the opera from the outset with the piano in the opening scene as the focal point with characters clambering over it and even emerging from it, some dressed in medieval clothes inspired by Dürer, as Sachs and Pogner/Liszt pound out the overture on the piano. The characters emerging are products of Wagner’s imagination and aspects of himself.25 One of the characters gathered there represents Wagner’s friend, the German-Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, ostensibly to conduct Die Meistersinger—who we soon realise will “become” Beckmesser in the “real” performance.26 Of course this is pure invention—neither Levi nor anyone else for that matter conducted the opera at Bayreuth in Wagner’s lifetime. The issue of antisemitism is soon problematized when Wagner himself, “playing” Hans Sachs, forces Levi to kneel during the opening chorale, an obvious reference to Wagner’s suggestion that Levi be baptized before he conducted Parsifal. Wagner sometimes referred to himself as “Hans Sachs”, but saw his younger self reflected in Walther, as well as claiming that he had married Eva, who is here presented as Cosima, with Pogner her father as Franz Liszt. While the self-reflexivity of the opera is emphasized by Kosky in that not only Sachs but many of the other characters such as David have elements of Wagner at various times of his life in their appearance, Sachs and Walther are presented as direct images of Wagner himself.27 The principal protagonist of Kosky’s production, therefore, is Wagner himself.28 Beckmesser in these early scenes is portrayed as arrogant, pedantic, self-centred and fully convinced that he is the only candidate who has a real chance of winning Eva’s hand in the song contest.

true sense of the term (rather than simply as a setting of a prescribed text). A further third is reserved for aspects of the plot that bear some relation to the subject of music. And only the remaining third is a setting of words that are not primarily concerned with music”. Lutz Koepnick (2002, p. 73) notes that “nowhere .... is Wagner’s music so artificial as in the appearance of simplicity with which it clothes itself in Die Meistersinger”. 25 The use of the piano links it with Katharina Wagner’s production which sees Walther emerge from the piano in her staging. This opening scene strongly resembles the painting by Georg Papperitz, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”. 26 In earlier drafts of the libretto, Beckmesser was known as Veit Hanslick—a direct reference to the influential Viennese critic, Eduard Hanslick with whom Wagner had a fraught relationship. Grey (2002, pp. 186–187) describes several contemporary caricatures of Wagner “that portray him in the guise of his own demonised Jewish enemy”, while Wagner’s “real competition . . . is not primarily identified with those ‘Jewish musicians’ [Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and Halévy], but with a higher authority in matters of popular melody and vocal display, Giuseppe Verdi (and the Italian tradition)”. 27 The Konwitschny Hamburg production uses a similar strategy of Wagner look-alikes. 28 Ulrich Lenz (2017, p. 46) comments that art and life for Wagner intermingled “quite unlike any other composer” and this “makes it difficult to separate the one from the other.” Wagner “stylised his own life as a work of art . . . his life and his daily existence were transformed into a performance that was ‘fit for a stage’. Stories from his contemporaries attest to how Wagner, in a kind of endless one-man-show, was perpetually reading aloud, reciting, acting, singing—in other words, always performing. Everything, even the most banal activity, was turned into theatre—and in the end, fed back into his work”.

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But the core focus commences when, towards the end of Act One, Wahnfried recedes and is replaced by Nuremberg—not the postcard view of the medieval city, but the city as site of the postwar trials—with Wagner/Sachs left entirely alone on stage. It is as if the world of Wagner, and even that of Germany itself, recedes into the background to be replaced by the symbol of the culmination of the Third Reich— the Nuremberg Trials. Of course, Nuremberg as the site of the Nazis’ annual rally is charged with significance. But the city in 1945 was a smoking ruin; as Hohendahl (1993, p. 39) notes, “many of the houses, churches, fountains, and statues that had stood as manifestations of the German culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had ceased to exist. The end of the Third Reich in 1945 seemed to be also the end of German history as it had been conceived by nineteenth-century German historians, critics, and artists, Richard Wagner among them”. The second act occurs in Courtroom 600 at the Palace of Justice where the Military Tribunal was held. The trial of Wagner/Sachs commences as Sachs stands in the dock—this is where both second and third acts will play out. In a sense Kosky is taking his cue from Sachs himself who states in the third act, “Ich bin verklagt und muss bestehn” (I have been accused and I must justify myself): Sachs/Wagner must answer for that which he has done and is going to do. The trajectory of the second act moves towards a horrifying conclusion in a pogrom, with Beckmesser as its victim being beaten beneath a portrait of the young Wagner and forced to do a grotesque dance with the head of a Jewish caricature straight out of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer, while a larger one inflates to fill much of the stage before deflating with a large Star of David prominent. Visually, there is a gradual accumulation of disturbing imagery with Nazi connotations. Beckmesser is later accompanied by five grotesque Jewish figures. As becomes increasingly apparent, the production emphasizes the Jewish stereotypes that permeated Wagner’s writing, if not directly his operas.29 The third act is in “full court” setting with the Soviet, American, British, and French flags prominent as a backdrop, and Sachs having dinner at the front of stage. Seemingly paradoxically, Kosky’s is a more “traditional” staging than Katharina Wagner’s visually more radical conception, but Kosky still presents much disturbing, suggestive imagery. However, the “action” does not radically differ from what one might expect in a more standard production. As Zachary Woolfe (2017) observes, “Kosky plays the opera mostly straight, as if the composer were sketching his intentions in the midst of a cross-chronological fever dream”. Sachs sings about all poetry being primarily the interpretations of dreams, and one could argue that this production might be seen as a dream, or more appropriately, the worst nightmare of Beckmesser’s. Similarly, the relationship between Sachs and Beckmesser is relatively neutral— Sachs is never shown to be treating Beckmesser badly and even calms the crowd at

29 Adorno (2005, p. 19) argued that “the scene was merely an anticipation of the pogroms of the Third Reich”, while many critics have expressed their discomfort at the violence of this scene.

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the end when they are seen mocking Beckmesser.30 Beckmesser, with his arm in a sling as a result of the beating he received at the end of Act Two, cannot accompany himself in his song, and is accompanied by an on-stage harpist curiously named “Helga Beckmesser”! What relation she is to him is not made clear.31 But Beckmesser disappears and is erased from the final moments, with the focus exclusively on Sachs, while in Katharina Wagner’s production he remains prominent, and remains a direct challenge to the status quo.32 This “absence” highlights Kosky’s ruthless exposure of the antisemitic elements in the opera, particularly as regards the treatment of Beckmesser with his final and complete humiliation and elimination. In contrast, Katharina Wagner has a form of life-affirming resolution for him as a performance artist: the only true visionary in this sea of reactionary, conforming masters. Kosky, perhaps, is saying that this opera, in the final analysis, cannot be redeemed. Is Katharina Wagner trying to “rehabilitate” the ending—if that is possible—through her exposure of all its problematic elements and “redemption” of Beckmesser? This is left open for audience interpretation.

The Ending of Die Meistersinger The final scene of the opera poses the question of the judgement of Wagner. John Carmody (2018) asks how one might stage “this troublesome scene (which is, simultaneously, disturbingly xenophobic yet seriously engaging in its artistic philosophy) in a way that is both artistically and morally true?” In some ways these final moments are the most innovative and disturbing of Kosky’s production. An orchestra and chorus moves to the front of the stage in the final scene and then recede as Sachs/Wagner is left alone in the dock as he “conducts” the final moments, having the last “word” in effect—it is the music that finally “speaks”.33 The trajectory is the opposite of a more “traditional” production where the stage in Act Three fills with pageantry and colour—here it gradually empties with the focus on the music and our judgement of the solitary figure of Sachs/Wagner. In terms of what occurs in this final scene in the opera, Klaus van den Berg (2002, p. 163) suggests that “there is a power vacuum waiting to be exploited . . . . Beckmesser’s absence from the final tableau—following his miserable failed performance—implies his failure as mastersinger, and, more devastatingly, that his

30

See Pritchard (2018) for further discussion of this point. The harpist (Ruth-Alice Marino) is listed as the (fictitious) character “Helga Beckmesser” in the programme. 32 Some productions have Beckmesser re-emerge after the performance of the Prize Song and participate in the general festivities. 33 Most of the main characters step into the dock at some stage. 31

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absence is necessary for the survival and further growth of German art”.34 Kosky’s staging is also a significant contrast to Katharina Wagner’s production where the status quo is seemingly critically re-constituted with Sachs and Walther as the new conservative pillars of the establishment, while Beckmesser, although of course still expelled from this society—“ghettoized, banished to a kind of internal exile”, as Levin (1996, p. 129) puts it—is seen as the real revolutionary whose artistic credo points the way towards the future.35 The final monologue of Sachs is problematic in and of itself where Sachs explains to Walther and everyone else the significance of the Prize Song for the future of German art.36 Lydia Goehr (2002, p. 64) asks of the ending of the opera, and particularly in regard to this monologue, whether it was Wagner’s desire “that his audience not be, as his chorus of Volk seem to be, content merely with a happy, upbeat feeling of success and satisfaction, but that it also leave the theater with some sort of socially transformative thought”.37 Both productions certainly provoke a strong reaction from their audiences, particularly in this problematic scene, challenging them to critically evaluate their views on Wagner and art in general. These productions are outstanding examples of what is known, frequently disparagingly, as Regietheater (“director’s theatre”), and both engage creatively with the opera in strongly contrasting ways. Because of its surrounding polemic, Die Meistersinger is a work that has become a site for radical directorial approaches, and Bayreuth, although somewhat belatedly, has certainly now followed suit. While both productions have elements of postmodernist playfulness in their conception, they are confronting, disturbing interpretations, far from a comfortable—not to mention comforting—night in the theatre. One might argue that they follow in a modernist tradition, offering a staging “in which criticism is predicated upon . . . revolutionary transformation, however hopeless a prospect that might seem, however tragic the

34 Van den Berg (2002: 163) observes that “Beckmesser experiences a continual slide from his moral and aesthetic high ground in Act I as the virtually all-powerful Marker to the lowly thief in Act III—by attempting to steal Walther/Sachs’s Meisterlied—following his artistic humiliation in Act II . . . . Departing from the traditional ending of comedy, there is neither reconciliation . . . nor any indication that he might be reformed as a result of his experience. Laughter in Die Meistersinger does not function to restore and heal, but rather ‘malfunctions’ to ostracize and wound” (163). 35 Sollich (2007, p. 26) notes of Beckmesser in Act III that “what appears at first sight to be a crude attempt at plagiarism . . . suddenly turns out to have unsuspected parallels with post-structuralist techniques of textual assimilation . . . Beckmesser turns out to be a deconstructionist avant la lettre, a reader who inscribes himself in the text and in that way continues to write it”. 36 Lydia Goehr (2002, p. 61) notes that “what becomes obvious in his monologue is that there is nothing obvious about the significance of the Preislied [prize song], and that it is the shattering of this obviousness that is intended to shift our response to the song from being one of blind satisfaction to one of critical reflection on the future of art.” 37 Edward Said (1998, p. 21) sees these final moments as “threatening” and “menacing”, with Sachs suggesting “that once one acknowledges the presence of something new and gifted like [Walther von] Stolzing, there is nevertheless the need to follow, and the collective is, in a sense, most important . . . there’s the idea of the outside as threatening: there’s a kind of xenophobic quality to it, in the opera . . . which is troubling”.

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denouement, [and which] may be distinguished from one in which it is all a bit of a game and nothing should be taken too seriously” (Berry 2018, p. 470). On one level Kosky’s production is more “traditional” than Katharina Wagner’s, but the potency of many of the stage images remain seared in the memory. Kosky chooses to focus primarily on the political aspects surrounding the opera although the final moments do highlight the role and importance of art, while Katharina Wagner’s focus ranges more widely in terms of the nature of creativity and the role of art in society. In a completely different way to Katharina Wagner’s strategy, the celebratory element implicit in these final, deeply problematic moments are completely undercut by Kosky’s staging which demands of the audience—the tribunal—to judge the composer; but the case is left open—Wagner’s relationship to the Nazis and antisemitism is left for the audience to decide. Kosky’s profound view of the work poses the ultimately simple, yet probably unanswerable question: how far does Wagner’s undoubted racism undermine or invalidate his overall artistic achievement? This is left open for debate and it is a question that will continue to resonate and perplex us. McClatchie (2008, p. 149) argues: We need to continue to engage with Die Meistersinger as both a work of art and a historical artefact. While critical theory has certainly popularized the idea that the meaning of a work is not frozen with the death of its creator, neither is it frozen after a particular moment in its reception history. While Meistersinger was used and understood by Wagner, his contemporaries, his successors, and the Nazis to construct a collective, cultural memory of the German nation, the nature of the nation continued to shift—and continues to do so today.

One might argue that both productions build on Wieland Wagner’s second post-war production which outraged contemporary audiences, but did much to inaugurate a more critical approach to staging Wagner. In an imaginary world, one could even imagine a fusion of these two directorial approaches in which the issues of creativity, art, society and love are part of a broad investigation of all the political and historical baggage that has accompanied Die Meistersinger since its premiere. In this stimulating, disturbing, and thought-provoking production, Kosky reminds us of the importance and necessity of maintaining an ongoing, clear-eyed and critical engagement with great works of art.

References Adorno, T. (2005). In Search of Wagner. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso. (Versuch über Wagner. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1952). Barenboim, D. (1998). Daniel Barenboim & Edward Said: A Conversation. Raritan, 18, 1–31. Bernhart, W. (2015). Metareference in Operatic Performance: The Case of Katharina Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In W. Bernhart, Essays on Literature and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart, ed. W. Wolf (pp. 447–458). Leiden: Brill. Berry, M. (2008). Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 19 March 2008. The Boulezian, 21 Mar. Retrieved September 14, 2020, from https://boulezian.blogspot.com/ 2008/03/die-meistersinger-von-nrnberg.html.

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Berry, M. (2018). “ES KLANG SO ALT UND WAR DOCH SO NEU!”: Modernist operatic culture through the prism of staging of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In B. Heile & C. Wilson (Eds.), Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music (pp. 454–474). Abingdon: Routledge. Carmody, J. (2018). Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Bayreuth Festival). Australian Book Review, 1 August. Retrieved September 14, 2020, from https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/artsupdate/tag/John%20Carmody. Carnegie, P. (1994). Stage History. In J. Warrack (Ed.), Richard Wagner: “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (pp. 135–152). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennis, D. B. (2002). “The Most German of All Operas”: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich. In N. Vaszonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (pp. 98–119). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Geck, M. (2013). Richard Wagner: A Life in Music. Trans. Stewart Spencer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Goehr, L. (2002). The Dangers of Satisfaction: On Songs, Rehearsals, and Repetition in Die Meistersinger. In N. Vaszonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (pp. 56–70). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Goldman, A. J. (2017). A “Gay Jewish Kangaroo” Takes on Wagner at Bayreuth. New York Times, 24 July. Retrieved September 14, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/arts/music/ bayreuth-wagner-meistersinger-kosky.html. Grey, T. S. (2002). Masters and Their Critics: Wagner, Hanslick, Beckmesser, and Die Meistersinger. In N. Vazsonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (pp. 164–188). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Grey, T. S. (2008). The Jewish Question. In T. S. Grey (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (pp. 203–218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hohendahl, P. U. (1993). Reworking History: Wagner’s German Myth of Nuremberg. In R. Grimm & J. Hermand (Eds.), Re-Reading Wagner (pp. 39–60). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Koepnick, L. (2002). Stereoscopic Vision: Sight and Community in Die Meistersinger. In N. Vazsonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (pp. 73–97). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Kosky, B. (2017). If I Had a Hammer. Bayreuth Festspiele Programme Book. pp. 42–44. Lenz, U. (2017). An R. Sleeps in All Things Around. . .or. . . How Much Richard is There in the Meistersinger? Bayreuth Festspiele Programme Book. pp. 46–58. Levin, D. J. (1996). Reading Beckmesser Reading: Antisemitism and Aesthetic Practice in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. New German Critique, 69, 127–146. Levin, D. J. (1997). Reading a Staging/Staging a Reading. Cambridge Opera Journal, 9(1), 47–71. McClatchie, S. (2008). Performing Germany in Die Meistersinger. In T. S. Grey (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (pp. 135–150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, M. (2010). Katharina Wagner's Die Meistersinger, Now in its Fourth Year at Bayreuth. New York Arts: An International Journal for the Arts, 8 October. Retrieved September 14, 2020 from https://newyorkarts.net/2010/10/katharina-wagner-meistersinger-bayreuth/. Millington, B. (1991). Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-semitism in Die Meistersinger? Cambridge Opera Journal, 3, 247–260. Millington, B. (2007). “Faithful, All Too Faithful”: Fidelity and Ring Stagings. Opera Quarterly, 23, 265–276. Pritchard, J. (2018). Barrie Kosky puts Wagner on Trial Again at Bayreuth. Seen and Heard International, 3 August. Retrieved September 14, 2020, from https://seenandheardinternational.com/2018/08/barrie-kosky-puts-wagners-die-meistersinger-on-trial-again-at-bay reuth/. Said, E. (1998). Daniel Barenboim & Edward Said: A Conversation. Raritan, 18, 1–31.

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Skramstad, P.-E. (2010). Die Meistersinger von Wagner. Wagneropera.net. Retrieved September 14, 2020, from https://www.wagneropera.net/articles/articles-bayreuth-2010-skramstadkatharina-wagner-meistersinger.htm. Sollich, R. (2007). “What Matters Here is Art” - But What Sort of Art?. Bayreuth Festspiele Programme Book. pp. 18–27. Spotts, F. (1994). Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vaget, H. R. (2002). “Du warst mein Feind von je”: The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited. In N. Vazsonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (pp. 190–208). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. van den Berg, K. (2002). Die Meistersinger as Comedy: The Performance and Social Signification of Genre. In N. Vazsonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (pp. 145–164). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Vaszonyi, N. (Ed.). (2002). Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Wagner, K. (2009). We Do What We Do Because We Are Totally Convinced—And That’s All That Matters. Bayreuth Festspiele Programme Book, np. Weiner, M. A. (1995). Richard Wagner and the Anti-semitic Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Weiner, M. A. (1996). Reading the Ideal. New German Critique, 69, 53–83. Woolfe, Z. (2017). Review: A New Meistersinger in Bayreuth Stars Wagner. New York Times, 1 August. Retrieved September 14, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/arts/ music/wagner-meistersinger-bayreuth-review.html. Žižek, S. (2005). Foreword: Why is Wagner Worth Saving. In Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans Rodney Livingstone (pp. xiii–xiv). London: Verso.

Michael J. Halliwell studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the London Opera Centre. He sang in Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia and was principal baritone with the Netherlands Opera, the Nürnberg Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera, singing over fifty major operatic roles. He has served as Pro-Dean and Head of School, and Associate Dean (Research) at the Sydney Conservatorium. He is President of the International Association for Word and Music Studies. His publications include Opera and the Novel (Rodopi 2005) and National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths Reconsidered (Routledge 2018).

Chapter 9

(Not) Repeating the Past in Barrie Kosky’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg John R. Severn

Abstract This chapter serves as a companion to Michael Halliwell’s work on Barrie Kosky’s Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Chap. 8. It uses close reading to demonstrate Kosky’s techniques of staging and structuring, especially repetition and doubling, and his theatrical modes of argumentation and rhetoric. This draws on the theme of repetition as a feature of Kosky’s direction discussed in Jennifer McMahon’s theorising of Kosky’s early Australian work in Chap. 3 and Charlotte Farrell’s discussions of his later Australian work in Chap. 5. I add to McMahon’s and Farrell’s analyses to demonstrate Kosky’s continuing use of repetition and doubling as flexible tools rather than as directorial tics that can easily be either understood as signifying in a fixed way or dismissed as primarily a stylistic feature. This is not a production that draws a clear causal trajectory between Wagner, his works and the Nazi regime. The production is not a show trial of Wagner with a foregone conclusion: instead, it is an invitation to exercise our faculty of judgment rather than pass sentence, and, importantly, to experience the challenges of judging the past while not avoiding our responsibilities to the future by rejecting this as simply too hard.

This chapter serves as a companion piece to Michael Halliwell’s work on Barrie Kosky’s Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Chap. 8. It provides a close reading of scenes from the production that demonstrate some of Kosky’s techniques of staging and structuring, especially his use of repetition and doubling, and his theatrical modes of argumentation and rhetoric. This draws on the theme of repetition as a feature of Kosky’s direction that has already arisen in Jennifer McMahon’s theorising of Kosky’s early Australian work in Chap. 3 and Charlotte Farrell’s discussions of his later Australian work in Chap. 5. In this chapter I aim to add to McMahon’s and Farrell’s analyses to demonstrate Kosky’s continuing use of repetition and doubling as flexible tools rather than as directorial tics that

J. R. Severn (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_9

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can easily be either understood as signifying in a fixed way or dismissed as primarily a stylistic feature. As Jennifer McMahon argues in Chap. 3, a repetition of emotional extremes can signal that there is a meaning to be mined from the use of repetition even if individual audience members cannot immediately work out what that meaning is. In this respect, repetition’s ability to lodge itself in the memory allows for meaning to continue to be constructed and correspondences to be made well after the performance itself is over and the audience has left the theatre. Here one might argue for repetition as a structural feature that in some circumstances is also a useful tool in alerting audiences to similarities and differences in situations, characters and actions separated by scenes or even acts. Kosky’s 1998 King Lear for Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company made significant use of repetition, doubling and mirroring. For example, the musical reprise was used as a structuring device that kept a sense of stylistic order in scenes of psychological chaos and that signalled various forms of “madness” in repeated scenes for Edgar, Kent, the Fool and Lear in which they sang manic la-la-la versions of Beethoven’s setting of the Ode to Joy. The reprise was also used more clearly to create meaning, suggesting links and contrasts between characters and tracing character development in Lear’s melancholy, confused, lonely, fragmented and unaccompanied reprise of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, first sung as a joyous production number for the Fool and a chorus of Lear’s knights. A particularly striking use of repetition and doubling was the mirroring of Edgar’s faeces-smeared mouth and underpants while he was disguised as Poor Tom and his brother Edmund’s bloodstained mouth and underpants as he sat on the throne in the last scene, his tongue and penis bitten off by Goneril and Regan (“in what was presumably over-competitive foreplay” as Richard Madeleine (2002, p. 16) memorably put it). While we might grasp for meaning in the connections and contrasts that structural repetition and doubling set up, the construction of meaning is not necessarily the most useful function of these techniques. We might also frame these separated but “rhyming” scenes in Brechtian terms as each serving to denaturalise, make strange or otherwise destabilise the authority of the other. Discussing the use of such scenes in his Messingkauf Dialogues, Bertolt Brecht writes: “The last scene estranges the first (just as the first estranges the last, which constitutes the real impact of the play)” (Brecht 2014, p. 67).1 Similarly, in Kosky’s production of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for Oper Frankfurt (2010), the Edinburgh Festival (2013) and Los Angeles Opera (2014), the bearded Sorceress in Act Three’s shipboard scene was initially dressed in a similar long pink dress to the one worn by Dido in Act One. A link between the characters was clearly being signalled through costume, but that link was not easily fathomed during the performance (or indeed afterwards, for me at least). However, this grasping for potential meaning contributed to the creation of an appropriately uncanny aura to a scene of the

1 For a discussion of Kosky, Brecht and other German-speaking playwrights in the context of Australian theatre, see Garde (2007).

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supernatural, and also served to denaturalise the preceding scenes of Dido and Aeneas. If it did not fully destabilise the authority of the “reality” of the scenes without the Sorceress and her witches, it nonetheless restored to Dido and Aeneas a sense of their legendary origin alongside their on-stage “reality”. These uses of repetition and doubling of course require an audience to “read” a stage in a non-naturalistic way that gives weight to form—as conveyed in relationships within and among blocking, costume, gesture, lighting design, among other sign systems—as well as to more straightforward narrative and verbal content. Although Dido and Aeneas made use of stylisation in design and staging and King Lear was ostentatiously non-naturalistic in almost every sign-system, audiences cannot be relied upon to agree to take a reception position that “reads” the stage in terms of form as well as content, even in the most stylised or non-naturalistic productions. The fact that some audience members, used to “heritage-style” productions of Shakespeare, found it difficult to “read” King Lear’s stage in this way while others ostentatiously refused to do so accounts for some of that production’s polarised reception.2 In a production like Kosky’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that is much less overtly stylised or non-naturalistic, the use of form as a directorial tool requires particularly careful handling: as I discuss below, Kosky spends the overture and the entire long first act training his audiences in reading an apparently largely historicising, naturalistic production in non-naturalistic ways. In Chap. 5 Charlotte Farrell demonstrated how Kosky used closely spaced repeated gestures not in terms of structure, but in terms of character, specifically to push dramatic character to its limits and obstruct an experience of catharsis for characters and audiences. In contrast, Kosky has also used repeated gestures to solidify a sense of character and signal character traits in sign systems beyond the verbal, as well as to create a sense of comedy. Thus, in his production of Richard Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau for the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in 2010, the opera begins with a sleeping Sir Morosus. Morusus, a character who is hypersensitive to sound, does not waken when his housekeeper walks round the bed repeatedly and ostentatiously spraying air freshener. Once he has woken up, his barber then massages him and repeatedly sticks acupuncture needles into Morosus’ hand and head, at which Morosus barely flinches. Through their repetition these gestures and actions create comedy in themselves and set the audience up for further comedy through the contrast between Morosus’ underreactions to some stimuli and subsequent overreactions to aural ones, consolidating Morosus as a character hypersensitive to sound by signalling him as being hyposensitive to smell and touch. As Michael Halliwell discusses in Chap. 8, Kosky in his production of Die Meistersinger engages with a history of antisemitism and antisemitic discourse 2

Richard Fotheringham (2001, p. 219) contextualises the particularly negative reaction to Kosky’s King Lear in Brisbane by noting that Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale, the three Shakespearean plays produced before King Lear by the Queensland Theatre Company—the co-producing company along with Bell Shakespeare—were sponsored by the Heritage Building Society. Marketing for these plays “suggest[ed] their company’s ‘Heritage’ advertising strategy and high-art prestige”.

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that swirl around Wagner and his works, both in themselves and in their history of production and reception. As artistic judgement is an internal theme of the opera, so Kosky sets up Wagner and the opera for historical judgment by the audience (and, at the end of Act 2, sets up the audience for judgment by the production and by history), but refrains from delivering a judgment himself. If we are familiar with Kosky’s modus operandi in his use of repetition, doubling, and rhyming scenes, their appearance will alert us to issues of character creation or destabilisation, meaningmaking or estrangement, but without providing us with a formulaic approach to reception strategies: they are not in themselves a formula that allows us to decode the stage, but a set of practices that alert us to the need to find a way to decode the stage beyond psychological-realist reception techniques. We will also not only be prepared for Kosky to refrain from delivering an overt judgment himself, but will also not expect to come to a final judgment ourselves in the course of the performance. If the duration of a theatre performance is rarely a good context in which to come to a final judgment on a complex topic, the relentless flow of music-driven action that occupies the senses in opera means that the duration of an opera performance is even less of an ideal context in which to reflect, measure up and come to a conclusion. However, Kosky’s use of repetition provides images that stick in the mind, making themselves available for conscious or unconscious processing after the event. For those who demand, expect or simply take pleasure from theatre productions that provide a solid sense of closure, such openness, such a sense of homework still to be done, is unlikely to satisfy and may simply lead to a rejection of the production. However, even for them, the habit of repetition, doubling and mirroring of lodging themselves in the memory means that the mind may continue to process the production beyond the theatre. For those used to Kosky’s directorial style, the time after the theatre event is when they expect to let their minds go to work. For one not to have fully grasped a production’s meaning or modus operandi while the performance plays itself out in real time need not be a sign of failure on the part of either oneself or the production. The in-the-moment pleasures of spectacle and music need not be rejected as politically suspect if we know that we are also committing ourselves to processing the production’s rhetorical-structural devices after the event. Unlike Kosky’s 1998 King Lear, his Die Meistersinger is not overtly non-naturalistic. Nor can this production be straightforwardly classed as “concept opera”, or even Regieoper. In the main, it tells Wagner’s Meistersinger storyline without taking ostentatious plot liberties. Indeed, its elaborate and meticulously designed sets (by Rebecca Ringst) and costumes (by Klaus Bruns) could easily allow it to be described as a detailed, historicist production. The problem, however, is that it is at least three detailed historicist productions, with fluid boundaries that are crossed by several characters, and that often share the same stage: one set in nineteenth-century Bayreuth, that the production constructs for us as the dramatic “present”, one set in the late-medieval past in Nuremberg, and one set in a “future” Nuremberg of the 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials. As I discuss below, Kosky uses repetition and doubling to destabilise a sense of stable character and a stable past. His production does not, however, argue that we are in a position to judge the past from a

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stable present: we have no representatives of contemporary society on stage until the very end, and then these take the form of a chorus and orchestra apparently devoid of dramatic character. Nor does it argue that we can dispense with historical contextualisation: indeed, its constant playing with historical markers seems to suggest both the vital importance of historical contextualisation, and the extreme difficulty in obtaining this. On one hand, the production seems to set out an argument that we can see patterns in Germany’s national-political and national-artistic past, and if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past we need to recognise these. On another, Kosky’s theatrical uses of repetition as a destabilising device alert us to the difficulty of passing judgment on the past, while his fluctuating use of doubling and mirroring flags the risks and attractions of reading Wagner’s characters as avatars of the composer and his circle. Finally, in this list of what Kosky’s Die Meistersinger does not do, Kosky’s use of repetition and doubling does not set up links and connections that create simplistic theories of cause and effect: indeed, his repetition and doubling undermine a sense of straightforward cause and effect. This is not a production that draws a clear causal trajectory between Wagner, his works and relationships and the Nazi regime. The production is not a show trial of Wagner with a foregone conclusion: instead, it is an invitation to exercise our faculty of judgment rather than pass sentence, and—importantly—to experience the challenges of judging the past while not avoiding our responsibilities to the future by rejecting this as simply too hard. Kosky’s use of repetition, doubling and mirroring is not a directorially imposed concept: repetition, doubling and mirroring are an integral part both of Wagner’s dramaturgy and rhetoric.3 As presented in Sachs’ final aria, the political body known as the Reich is the derivative, inauthentic double of German music, which is the bearer of the genuine unity and essence of the German people. If the German people stay true to German music, then they will be able to stay true to themselves even in the face of the dissolution of the Reich and the establishment of false, foreign rule (“falscher, welscher Majestät”). When Die Meistersinger had its première in 1868, the first Reich was no longer even the largely empty formality that it had been for centuries and the second Reich was three years away from its proclamation under the Hohenzollern Kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. With his apostrophe to German music, Sachs taps into the long-standing discourse according to which German culture is the custodian and even the foundry of national identity. As discussed in Chap. 1, German theatre has frequently seen itself as the judge, the rival and the truth of the German state: it was a double that was always confident it could tell itself apart from its administrative doppelgänger. In Kosky’s staging of Die Meistersinger this confidence is called into question rather than simply demolished. Here the Reich among whose rubble German music survives under foreign occupation is Hitler’s Reich. How is German music to maintain its distance from this Reich when the latter courted it so assiduously and drew inspiration from its antisemitism?

3 For extended discussion of Wagner’s use of repetition as a structural and dramaturgical feature in Die Meistersinger, see, for example, Goehr (2002).

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Can it keep itself pure by acknowledging its transnational impurities, its debts to so-called foreign artistic traditions and to artists from so-called foreign peoples? This would be to rethink Wagner’s pun on “welsch” and “falsch”: in this double act of the “foreign” and the “false”, the falseness of the foreign lies in the very idea of foreignness, in the exclusive disjunction whereby something is set apart from the national and on which the national is then dependent for its identity. Kosky’s repetition-with-difference unfolds itself through structure and character: each of the three acts begins in silence with projected text relating apparently historical detail, and ends with a coup de théâtre that invites the audience to judge complex, related situations. As the analyses below show, it also reveals itself through details of costume, setting, blocking, gesture and props, weaving itself fully into the fabric of the piece.

Setting and Unsettling the Scene: Overture and Beginners When the curtain rises on Kosky’s Bayreuth production, we see through a transparent scrim the grand interior of a nineteenth-century parlour, depicted by stage designer Rebecca Ringst with highly detailed realism, unoccupied and without music. The walls are lined with bookshelves surmounted by portraits. A black grand piano sits stage right with its lid closed, a sofa, chairs and an occasional table are grouped downstage left, and a set of double doors occupies upstage centre. In silence and as if in a film, text projected on to the scrim fades in and out, setting the scene line by line in detail: Wahnfried. 13. August 1875. 12:45 Uhr. Außentemperatur: 23 Grad Celsius. Kapellmeister Hermann Levi aus München hat sein Kommen angekündigt. Auch Franz Liszt ist auf dem Weg nach Bayreuth, um Tochter Cosima und Schwiegersohn Richard einen Besuch abzustatten. Cosima liegt mit einem Migräneanfall im Bett. Richard ist außer Haus. . . Molly und Marke Gassi zu führen.

(Wahnfried. 13 August 1875. 12.45 pm. Outdoor temperature 23 degrees Celsius. The conductor Hermann Levi from Munich has announced his appearance. Franz Liszt is also on his way to Bayreuth to pay his daughter Cosima and son-in-law Richard a visit. Cosima is in bed with a migraine. Richard is out . . . taking Molly and Marke for walkies).4 Here the gradation from excessively formal and scientific means of detailed scene-setting at the outset (“Außentemperatur: 23 Grad Celsius”) to homely and informal vocabulary (“Gassi zu führen”) at the end both provides 4 In what follows, I adopt the practice of these projections in referring to the onstage Wagner character as “Richard”. I use “Wagner” to refer to the composer himself.

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humour and sets the audience up to be aware of the production’s apparent historicizing naturalism as an engagement with historicization as a practice rather than as a transparent employment of it as a design feature. Only once this projected hyperhistoricizing information has come to an end does the overture start. With the first chord the scrim rises and the double doors fly open. Richard (Michael Volle) marches in in high spirits, wearing his characteristic beret and leading Molly and Marke, two large black Newfoundlands, each of which wears a large purple bib with his or her name on it. A maid (Wiebke Lehmkuhl) hurriedly wipes their wet footmarks from the polished parquet floor, and then takes them by the leash as a second maid enters and busies herself setting up for coffee and cakes. Next Cosima sweeps into the room, wearing a severe black dress, clearly in a foul mood and still suffering from her migraine.5 Liszt (Günther Groissböck) then barges in, knocking into the first maid and then into the second, each spinning round from the impact. Finally, the conductor Hermann Levi (Johannes Martin Kränzle) arrives, almost setting up a dance as he spins around to avoid banging into the still spinning second maid. Richard hands the dogs’ leashes to Levi and sits with him to go over a musical score, at times singing and conducting an imaginary orchestra, while Liszt kisses Cosima and sits near her as the first maid assists her with correspondence. The second maid serves coffee and cakes, and a third maid enters with a parcel for Richard, which he opens with childish enthusiasm: a pair of new boots, which he immediately tries on and shows off to the others (Fig. 9.1). Further parcels are brought in by the maids and unwrapped by Richard who passes their contents round for everyone to admire: a silk shawl, a large portrait of Cosima, a box of perfumes (Fig. 9.2). Cosima has little time for Richard’s enthusiasms, distracted by her migraine and apparently troubled by the contents of her correspondence (perhaps the bills for Richard’s purchases?). Although the initial projected text has prompted us to be alert for an engagement with historicism, so far this staging of the overture appears to preface a detailed historicist production, even if it is not yet clear how this scene of busy domesticity will relate to Die Meistersinger. If Wagner and his wife are set up as contrasting characters, one lively, enthusiastic and childlike, one severe, business-minded and adult, their home seems a happy one. The scene is imbued with references to all five senses, both in terms of the domestic and high arts—cookery, fabrics, perfume, painting, music—and the everyday, especially in terms of touch—clumsy entrances that send characters spinning into each other, a dirty floor that needs to be cleaned, the dogs’ deep, soft fur, details of the outdoor temperature. Audiences with varying degrees of background knowledge can take reassuring pleasure in their recognition of well-known and lesser-known aspects of Wagner’s circle, from Wagner’s famous beret and Liszt’s signature haircut, to Wagner’s penchant for perfumes and silks

5 The cast for the 2017 production and the 2018 and 2019 revivals remained largely the same. The main exception was the casting of Cosima, played by Anne Schwanewilms in 2017, Emily Magee in 2018 and Camilla Nylund in 2019. Screen grabs in this chapter are from the DVD recording of the 2017 production (Wagner 2017): images of Cosima are therefore of Anne Schwanewilms.

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Fig. 9.1 Richard (Michael Volle) shows off his new boots as Hermann Levi (Johannes Martin Kränzle) holds the dogs, Molly and Marke in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

Fig. 9.2 Richard tests one of his new perfumes in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

(extreme Wagner aficionados might experience the pleasure of feelings of superiority if they recognise that the portrait of Cosima delivered in this scene is a replica of one by Franz von Lenbach, not painted until 1879, four years after the announced date of this episode). However, things are about to take a less realistic turn. Until now the overture has served as incidental music to this domestic scene, audible by the audience but not by the characters, while the characters’ “speech” seems to be audible to the characters but not to the audience. Kosky then stages a

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Fig. 9.3 The youngest Richard emerges from the grand piano in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

sophisticated shift in the status of the music. When Liszt, irritated by the perfume testing, moves to the grand piano and begins (in mime) to play, Richard appears to “hear” what Liszt is playing. The music here shifts from incidental to diegetic, the “piano” music represented by the dry tones of paired oboes and clarinets in the orchestra. Richard swaps places at the piano with Liszt, and then both sit to play as a duet. Cosima, apparently still suffering from her migraine, moves to the piano to scold them and then back to the sofa downstage left where the first maid hands her a series of headache tablets, the orchestral strings Mickey Mousing the women’s movements. Here we have a combination of diegetic “piano” music and incidental music. This mingling of diegetic and incidental music prepares us for a shift from the detailed “realistic” representation of the domestic to the magical. As Liszt and Richard hammer out their duet increasingly violently, the piano lid begins to open, and Liszt jumps away from the piano in surprise, while Richard stands up to conduct what appears to be an invisible orchestra. As he sits down again to play, four “Richards” climb out of the piano, each representing the composer at different ages, from young boy to young man, and all wearing similar outfits to the middleaged Richard, although with age-appropriate differences in facial hair (Fig. 9.3). As each emerges from the piano, he goes to join one of the other characters. The youngest Richard, aged perhaps around ten, takes Liszt’s hand, then with one hand pushes him roughly down into an armchair and sits on his knee. An early teenaged Richard then takes Levi’s hand, and then with both hands pushes him into another chair and sits on his knee. A young adult Richard (Daniel Behle) smiles at the first maid and stands by her behind the sofa. Finally, a more mature adult Richard

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Fig. 9.4 An uncanny family grouping of multiple Richards in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

(Klaus Florian Vogt) kisses Cosima’s outstretched hand and sits next to her on the sofa, completing an uncanny family grouping as if for a portrait (Fig. 9.4). Here Kosky seems to suggest that Wagner’s self-confidence and habit of directing others has long roots. After the younger Richards have taken their places with the other characters and the piano lid closes, Richard becomes increasingly engrossed in his playing. When he notices Cosima’s signals for him to get up, he leaves the piano and begins to conduct not only the orchestra that carries on the “piano” music, but also the rest of the cast, to whom he gives instructions (it later appears that he was allocating them parts in the opera to come) and then directs as they shift furniture to form what appears to be a diegetic audience facing the phenomenal audience. Middle-aged Richard is now both conductor and stage director, directing his former selves as well as his family and friends. While until this point the scene had strong elements of comedy, things become more serious in the opera’s opening chorale, dedicated to John the Baptist, the beginning of which is marked by bringing the set lights down, turning off the diegetic gas chandelier, and leaving the room lit by candlelight. During this chorale, sung by an offstage chorus, Richard forces the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi to follow the Christian rites of kneeling, praying and making the sign of the cross. Right from the start of the opera proper, Levi is set up as a form of “Other”, a feature that will be reinforced later in the act, and increasingly so in the subsequent acts. During the orchestral interlude that follows the chorale, Richard shepherds the company out of their seats. Liszt and Levi sit on the sofa drinking coffee, the second and third maids leave the room, the three younger Richards are sent behind the piano,

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and Richard whips off the hat of the eldest of the young Richards. With this gesture the latter apparently becomes Walther von Stolzing, Cosima becomes Eva and the first maid Magdalena: the opera proper has fully begun. The company is no longer (only) a diegetic audience, but appear to be taking part in a semi-staged reading of Die Meistersinger hosted and directed by Richard, playing their operatic roles when required and watching the proceedings out of “operatic” character in their nineteenth-century personae when not singing. Richard continues to direct proceedings, guiding the first maid with Magdalena’s blocking and gestures and handing her props. During this trio, Liszt leaves the room. Things take another uncanny turn in scene 2. At the beginning of scene 2, Stolzing and the shoemaker’s apprentice David are alone on the “stage”, David’s role taken by the second eldest of the young Richards. Here we have two very similar versions of older Richard, who continues to direct. David leads Stolzing to the grand piano, and Stolzing peers short-sightedly at the music on the piano’s music desk, positioning his fingers on the keys, but hesitating for some time before he presses them. As soon as he begins to play, the double doors open and a crowd of young apprentices dressed in detailed, historicising late medieval costumes rushes in to the detailed, historicising nineteenth-century drawing room set. Are we to see here a parallel of Richard’s ability, demonstrated during the overture, to conjure up characters from the past by playing the piano? Later in this scene, after the apprentices have left, the lines DAVID. . . .das alles lernt ich mit Sorg und Acht: Wie weit nun, meint Ihr, daß ich’s gebracht? WALTHER. Wohl zu’nem Paar recht guter Schuh?

(DAVID. . . . I learned all this [about singing] with care and attention:/how far have I got with it, do you think? WALTHER. As far as a good pair of shoes?) prompt David to take off his boot, which he holds up admiringly and passes to Walther to examine (Fig. 9.5). Again, we have a feeling of déjà vu. The sense that we are witnessing a form of repetition of the apparently trivial events of the overture as the packages were delivered and unwrapped is strengthened during David’s passage discussing the different tones of song, as David then mixes perfumes from the perfume box, both David and Walther smelling the scents individually (Fig. 9.6). During his passage on how to sing, he wraps Walther in the silk shawl; finally, the young apprentices appear again and carry portraits down to the front of the stage, Cosima’s portrait in prime position. A strictly literal approach cannot account for this repetition: while the shawl, the portrait and the perfumes might have been bought and delivered specifically to be used as props in this salon “staging”, older Richard is still wearing the new boots. Instead, Kosky has brought us to a situation where the past and the present appear to intrude upon each other, where repetition occurs but with no straightforward line of cause and effect, where boundaries between “then” and “now” and “there” and “here” are blurred, and where detailed historicist sets and costumes do not amount to a detailed historicist production, but instead fracture a sense of a stable past.

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Fig. 9.5 David/Young Richard (Daniel Behle) holds up his boot while Walther/Young Richard (Klaus Florian Vogt) watches in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

Fig. 9.6 David/Young Richard and Walther/Young Richard test perfumes in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

As Michael Halliwell discusses in Chap. 8, Beckmesser is a character with a long history of being received in antisemitic contexts as at least displaying stereotypically Jewish traits. In keeping with what we witnessed of Richard’s treatment of Hermann Levi during the chorale, Richard assigns him the role of Beckmesser. Resisted by

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Fig. 9.7 Veit Pogner (Günther Groissböck) emerges from the grand piano in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

Levi, Richard helps Levi out of his coat, places a livery collar round his neck, and a soft black hat on his head. In contrast to Walther and David who are still in their nineteenth-century clothes without medieval additions, Beckmesser’s costume shares features of both the nineteenth-century present and the past. More uncanny repetition-with-difference follows. As the apprentices leave after yet another irruption into the room, the piano lid lifts of its own accord, this time with no-one playing it. Stolzing/oldest younger Richard examines the piano with understandable curiosity, before the goldsmith and mastersinger Veit Pogner emerges from it in full historicising late-medieval costume (Fig. 9.7). Pogner, played by Günther Groissböck, who had played Liszt during the overture scene, sports Liszt’s characteristic haircut, but otherwise appears not to be Liszt-playing-Pogner, and seems not to be aware of older Richard’s attempts to direct the scene. With more uncanny disruption of a sense of stable viewing position, we seem to be moving gradually from a semi-staged production by nineteenth-century people into a world in which medieval characters intrude on a nineteenth-century environment, while remaining oblivious to the incongruousness of their surroundings. Shortly afterwards, the mastersingers Kunz Vogelgesang (Tansel Akzeybek) and Konrad Nachtigall (Armin Kolarczyk) also climb out of the piano, followed by the remaining seven mastersingers. One carries a package, a box, the contents of which he shows to his colleagues. Others sit on the sofa and enjoy coffee and cakes, while Beckmesser unwraps a brown paper package and eats a sandwich that he has brought along, and pours himself a glass of milk from his own little bottle, Richard’s facial expressions showing his disdain. With this busy scene of greetings, packages and coffee we have yet another repetition-with-difference of the domestic scene from the overture, and

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thus another destabilisation and estrangement of past and present. This time it is combined with a reminder of Levi-Beckmesser’s difference that is readable in terms of an observance of Jewish culinary laws, although that reading is not mandatory. During this busy scene, Richard has taken off his beret and put on his own livery collar, finally joining the cast as Hans Sachs, albeit a Hans Sachs through whom Richard is clearly visible. Kosky, with his string of younger Richards, seems to invite a reading of the opera in which Wagner at different stages of his life is present in each of Hans Sachs, Walther von Stolzing and the apprentice David. Further, complex, autobiographical parallels are suggested when the medieval Pogner refers to his daughter Eva while pointing at the large portrait of nineteenth-century Cosima, but with no indication that we should read Liszt, Cosima’s father, as Pogner’s underlying actor-character. Again, Kosky invokes past and “present”, but obstructs us from seeing easy or straightforward causal links between them. When Klaus-Florian Vogt comes back onstage, having left discreetly during the mastersingers’ coffee party, he is now dressed in full historicist medieval costume— he seems now to be fully Walther von Stolzing, and to have lost his younger-Richard underlying actor-character. We now have a complex of divisions of time and place. The largest grouping of characters is dressed in historicising medieval costume, and they appear to believe themselves to be in medieval Nuremberg, despite their surroundings being a detailed theatrical set representing a historicist vision of the nineteenth century. We have one grouping of nineteenth-century historical personages playing medieval characters: old Richard and Levi are still dressed in their nineteenth-century clothes, with symbolic costume touches to represent their medieval operatic character, and are aware that they are “acting” their operatic characters. Medieval Nuremberg and Wagner’s nineteenth-century home are linked by the large nineteenth-century portrait of Cosima, a portrait the medieval characters seem to believe is of the medieval character Eva, Pogner’s daughter. Nonetheless, with Walther’s appearance in medieval costume it appears that the production is moving us gradually back into a medieval time-frame, albeit framed by a nineteenth-century setting: we might at this point read Kosky as setting up Wagner’s medieval Nuremberg as a product of Wagner’s nineteenth-century imagination. However, Kosky’s project becomes clear at the end of the act in his first coup de théâtre. Following Walther’s disastrous demonstration of singing for the mastersingers (who move their chairs into line as a diegetic audience, another repetitionwith-difference of the overture scene) and the chaos that ensues (during which—as at the end of the overture scene—the set lights are lowered and the diegetic gas chandelier extinguished), the set is slowly wheeled back. If Wagner’s Nuremberg is a product of the nineteenth-century imagination, Kosky’s detailed vision of Wagner’s home is revealed as a contemporary theatrical box set on wheels. But there is more to come than metatheatricality. Having discreetly removed his livery chain, Richard steps off the set and out of the dramatic world, looking back at the onstage chaos he appears to have brought to life. As the set draws back, woodpanelled side walls and stands of Allied flags are revealed, a man in the uniform of the US military police marches on, a backdrop showing a third panelled wall and a court clock is lowered, and a witness stand rises through the floor. We are now—

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suddenly, unexpectedly, but given the destabilisation effects of the first act not illogically or incomprehensibly—in a new time and place: a detailed historicising reproduction of Courtroom 600 in which National Socialists were tried for war crimes during the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946. 1875’s Richard turns to face out front and steps, spotlit, into the witness box. A bounce to blackout on the final chord leaves the audience to process the scene for themselves.

Whose Nuremberg(s)? Act Two also begins in silence, with titles projected on a scrim. This time the projected words are from a scene of domestic happiness drawn from Cosima’s diary: Tagebuch Cosima Wagner. Sonntag, den 27ten November 1870 “Mir ist auf der Welt nichts Lieber als die Stube, wo ich bin, denn mir wohnt aneinander meine schöne Nachbarin”, singt Richard am Morgen. . . . . .dann tritt er zu mir und sagt: “Da liegt eine Melodie im Bett, eine recht große. . . . . .Du bist meine Melodie.”

(Cosima Wagner’s Diary/Sunday, 27 November 1870/“I like nothing better than the room I’m in, for my beautiful neighbour lives next to me”, sings Richard in the morning. . ./. . . then he comes to me and says, “there is a melody lying in bed, a rather grand one too. . ./. . .You are my melody”). But Kosky’s staging does not allow us to wallow in a sense of domesticity. Act 2’s Saint John’s Eve scene lies in a temporal no-man’s-land, watched over by Courtroom 600’s clock, the time stopped at the same time we left it at the end of Act 1. In the original 2017 production, Richard and Cosima were visible through the scrim during the projections, picnicking on an untidy lawn of withered grass surrounded by the wood-panelled walls of Courtroom 600, with pieces of furniture from the Villa Wahnfried scattered across the stage. A creeping plant had grown up over the witness stand from the end of Act 1. By the end of Act 2, the grass and plants had been discreetly removed, leaving a bare floor. In the 2018 and 2019 revivals, Act 2 began with this bare floor, and with the furniture and furnishings of Act 1’s living-room at the Villa Wahnfried piled in a heap, as if the events were taking place in some untidy attic or lumber room of the mind. The witness stand serves various purposes throughout the scene. Once the scrim rises, Hermann Levi enters, followed by the first maid, both in their nineteenthcentury costumes and, apparently, personae. However, David and a choir of young apprentices soon enter, followed by Magdalena, now no longer the first maid, all in medieval costume. In fact, in this act, all except Sachs, Beckmesser and Eva are dressed in medieval costume. Sachs and Beckmesser make a doubled pair in Richard and Hermann Levi’s matching nineteenth-century trousers, shirts and waistcoats, with Richard’s cobbler’s apron and Levi’s lute symbolising their medieval characters. When, towards the end of the act, David mistakenly believes that Beckmesser is serenading Magdalena and the townspeople are in a frenzy, the 1940s US military

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Fig. 9.8 Beckmesser/Hermann Levi has an antisemitic caricature puppet head placed on him in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

policeman from Courtroom 600 at the end of Act 1 enters and stands holding a large portrait of Wagner, a reproduction of the 1862 portrait by Cäsar Willich that was a feature of Richard’s Act-One drawing room. David then grabs Beckmesser’s lute and destroys it with his cobbler’s hammer, using the frame of Wagner’s portrait as his last, as the American policeman stands aside. Beckmesser is then dragged to the ground by three apprentices: two apprentices hold him down by pressing the portrait over him, while the third strikes him repeatedly with a cobbler’s hammer. After Beckmesser is hauled to his feet, and draped over the portrait for support, one of the apprentices places over Beckmesser’s head a large puppet head in the form of the iconic caricature of “the Jew” from the antisemitic Nazi-era weekly magazine Der Stürmer (Fig. 9.8). When the portrait supporting the injured Beckmesser is snatched from under him, he staggers with arms outstretched in movements that on one hand suggest realistic injury and exhaustion and on another a caricature of Jewish dancing. As this is going on, a large swathe of fabric rises from the witness stand. As it unfolds to fill the stage, it transforms into a gigantic inflated replica of the puppet head Beckmesser is wearing: again a doubling-with-difference. Beckmesser moves towards the witness stand and sits in front of it, his large puppet head surmounted by its gigantic inflated double (Fig. 9.9). As the crowd disperses, Eva (still dressed in Cosima’s nineteenth-century costume), Walther, David and Magdalena run off. Sachs, alone on stage with Beckmesser, retreats to the upstage right corner of the courtroom, his arms pressed against the walls as if to steady himself in his terror. Beckmesser’s puppet head and the inflated version both stare out front from the witness box, their outsized, unblinking eyes as if accusing the audience. As an offstage nightwatchman sings “Hört, ihr Leut, und laßt euch sagen, die Glock hat

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Fig. 9.9 Beckmesser/Hermann Levi sits below a gigantic inflatable version of his puppet head in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

eilfe geschlagen: bewahrt euch vor Gespenstern und Spuck, daß kein böser Geist eur Seel beruck! Lobet Gott, den Herrn!” (Hear, people, and listen: the clock has struck eleven—keep safe from ghosts and phantoms, lest an evil spirit cast a spell on your soul! Praise God, gentlemen!), the inflated head begins to deflate. First it sinks and covers Beckmesser and the witness stand, then reduces further until the only features we are presented with are the accusatory eyes, staring at us as if in judgment, before tipping forward to fill our field of vision with its Star-of-David skull cap as the lights again bounce to blackout on the final chord.

Richard Defends Himself Like the previous acts, Act 3 begins in silence, with text projected on a scrim. This time no scene is visible through the scrim until the very end of the projections. Without saying so expressly, the text describes the RAF attack on the night of 2 January 1945 that completely destroyed Nuremberg’s historic centre. We read: Bericht Sir Charles Portal, Air Marshal der Royal Air Force, vom 4. Januar 1945. Beim Nachtangriff auf Nürnberg kamen auch deutsche Jäger vom Typ Messerschmitt Bf 100-G-4, Dornier Do 217N und Junkers Ju88 C/G zum Einsatz, die mit zwei nach oben gerichteten Geschützen ausgerüstet waren. Die beiden im Winkel vom 70 Grad montierten 20mm-Kanonen des Typs MG FF/M und MG 151/20 ermöglichten es den zumeist unbemerkt bleibenden deutschen Jägern, die Motoren und den in den Tragflächen befindlichen Treibstoff der britischen Bomber von unten im Brand zu schießen.

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Für die neue Waffentechnik verwendeten die Deutschen den Codenamen “Schräge Nachtmusik”.

(Report by RAF Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal from 4 January 1945./During the night attack on Nuremberg two German fighter aircraft were also employed, of the Messerschmitt Bf 100-G4, Dornier Do 217N and Junkers Ju88-C/G types, which were equipped with two guns pointed upwards./The two 20 mm MG FF/M- and MG 151/20-type guns were mounted at a 70-degree angle, enabling the German fighter aircraft, which mostly remained unnoticed, to shoot the British bombers’ motors and wing-mounted fuel into flames from below./The Germans used the codename “weird night music” for this new weapons technology).6 At the end of the projection, lights gradually rise revealing Courtroom 600 through the scrim. This time, the courtroom is set up for full session, with benches and papers for judges, reporters, interpreters and observers. Throughout Act 3 scenes 1–5 the clock hands move forward apparently in real time. The Russian, British, American and French flags are arrayed against the back wall. A double desk downstage right is bare on one side; the other is set with a white cloth, a bottle of wine, a single candle and plate of fruit. The room is empty of people except for Richard/Hans Sachs, who sits motionless at the desk with fruit. Dressed in his white shirt and black waistcoat, it is impossible to tell whether we are looking at Richard or Richard-Sachs. As he sits completely motionless and apparently pensive on the otherwise empty stage for around seven minutes as the slow orchestral prelude unfolds, we cannot tell whether he is deep in thought or, like our double, listening closely to the music. He is only gradually roused from his stillness as David enters in his medieval costume. When, in scene 3 of Act 3 Levi-Beckmesser enters the empty courtroom in his nineteenth-century costume, he limps, one arm is in a sling and the other hand is bandaged with a finger in a splint. Nonetheless, he still manages to play “air lute”, acknowledging the applause of an imaginary audience. However, his confidence seems to fail him, and he begins to stagger over to the witness box—we will see that he has cause to doubt his confidence later in the scene when, having welcomed the entries of a number of mastersingers with rapturous applause, the audience falls into hostile silence when Beckmesser makes his entrance. During Levi-Beckmesser’s imaginary performance, a child dressed in a black suit and wearing a mask that bears a striking resemblance to Levi, but with payot and a kippah, has entered discreetly and now emerges from the witness box. Astonished at this uncanny dwarfish double, Levi-Beckmesser runs his hand over the mask and then over his own face. Four other children then enter, also dressed in black suits with masks of old men, all wearing payot and kippot. If these masks are not the straightforward antisemitic caricatures of

“Schräge Nachtmusik” is difficult to translate concisely, and its military usage plays on a number of meanings. The German adjective “schräg” has the figurative meaning of “weird” or “strange”, but also the concrete meaning of “oblique” or “slanted”, here referring to the angle of the guns. “Schräge Musik” is also a set phrase meaning “off-key music”, “music with a strange tuning”, “offbeat music” or “music with a strange time signature”.

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the end of Act 2, with their old heads on children’s bodies they are nonetheless grotesque representations of Jews. These figures march to the witness box, where they crowd in with the first child. When Levi-Beckmesser joins them, they grab at him with outstretched arms and pull them down into their midst, from which he struggles free. They then scatter and leave the stage. Are these the guilty nightmares of a nineteenth-century assimilated Jew? As experienced by a figure such as Hermann Levi or as imagined by Wagner? The curtain falls between Act 3 scenes 5 and 6. During the interlude between scenes, we have a final projection, this time a passage from the libretto from the scene to follow: Hans Sachs: Ich bin verklagt und muß bestehn: drum laßt mich meinen Zeugen ausersehn – Ist jemand hier, der Recht mir weiß? Der tret’ als Zeug’ in diesen Kreis!

(HANS SACHS. I am accused and must face the accusation: so let me choose my witnesses. Is anyone here who will see justice done for me? Let him enter this circle as my witness!). Kosky here justifies his production’s theme of accusations and judgment with direct reference to Wagner’s own words. Scene 6 sees the clock going haywire, its hands turning rapidly counterclockwise throughout the scene, as if turning back time. The courtroom is filled with chorus and principals in medieval costume When Eva entered in scene 4 she did so (finally) in medieval costume; by scene 6, even Beckmesser is in full medieval regalia. However, as before, we are not granted a sense of a stable past, as later historical periods intrude: the American military policeman stands downstage left; the onstage harpist who accompanies Beckmesser is dressed in a sober 1950s suit, as if she were one of the interpreters from the Nuremberg Trials; when the medieval mastersinger Kothner sings “fanget an!” (begin!) he does so into a 1940s interpreter’s microphone. Most strikingly, in the interlude after the townspeople and mastersingers have taken their seats in the courtroom, the lights go down leaving only the spotlit witness stand. David enters in his nineteenth-century second-eldest-young-Richard outfit, places Cosima’s portrait from Act 1 in the stand, and dances round it. He then caresses the portrait’s face, before the two youngest Richards enter and kiss the portrait. When Richard-Sachs and eldest-young-Richard-Walther enter, they are also dressed in their nineteenth-century costumes, Richard-Sachs’ livery collar the only gesture towards the medieval. All five versions of Richard have therefore returned to their nineteenth-century appearance, setting up a series of doubles and triples. At the end of the song contest, after Beckmesser’s failure and expulsion and Stolzing’s win, the crowd disperses, taking the courtroom benches, flags and other paraphernalia with them. Despite having won the contest, young-Richard-Walther declares that he does not want to become a mastersinger. Hans Sachs’ long final aria “Verachtet mir die Meister nicht” (Do not scorn the masters) is therefore usually addressed to him. Instead, this is the signal for Kosky’s biggest coup de théâtre. Having declared that he does not want to become a mastersinger, Walther leaves the

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Fig. 9.10 Richard takes the witness stand in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

stage with Pogner and Eva without waiting to hear Sachs’ advice. Richard-Sachs is now alone on the same empty courtroom stage set on which he found himself at the end of Act 1. He then enters the witness stand and addresses the audience directly in his defence of German art (Fig. 9.10). At the words Drum sag’ ich Euch: Ehrt ihre deutschen Meister dann bannt Ihr gute Geister! Und gebt Ihr ihrem Wirken Gunst, zerging’ in Dunst das Heil’ge Röm’sche Reich, und bliebe gleich die heil’ge deutsche Kunst!

(therefore I say to you,/honour your German masters!/Then you will conjure up good spirits/and if you favour their work/even if the Holy Roman Empire were to melt into mist/then holy German art will still remain!) the courtroom backdrop rises, and an apparently twenty-first-century choir and full orchestra (not yet playing—in fact the “musicians” are members of the chorus) slide in on a huge wagon set, with Cosima sitting on a step in front of them. Richard then turns his back on the audience and begins to conduct as the choir and on-stage “orchestra” burst forth with the final chorus (Fig. 9.11). Having completed his speech in his own defence, Richard-Sachs summons his key witness: music itself. As the scene turns to a concert, Kosky’s stage production of Die Meistersinger both effaces itself and—in its stroke of theatrical brilliance—draws attention to itself. Can opera’s music plead an innocence separate from narrative and staging, both present and historical? The production does not provide an answer. Rather than sweeping the audience along in a triumphant final chorus under Richard’s masterly control, the wagon set begins to recede into the depths of the stage, and the backdrop falls again as the

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Fig. 9.11 Richard calls German music as his witness in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Screengrab from DVD Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 0735450

music continues. Richard, his back to the audience, is left conducting an empty courtroom. The audience is left to judge for themselves—in the hours, days or weeks following the production, as Kosky’s patterns, repetitions and doublings configure themselves to shore up or destabilise characters, histories and rhetorical positions.

References Brecht, B. (2014). Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks. Ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman. Trans. Charlotte Ryland et al. London: Bloomsbury. Garde, U. (2007). Brecht & Co.: German-Speaking Playwrights on the Australian Stage. Bern: Peter Lang. Goehr, L. (2002). The Dangers of Satisfaction: On Songs, Rehearsals, and Repetition in Die Meistersinger. In N. Vaszonyi (Ed.), Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, history, representation (pp. 56–70). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Fotheringham, R. (2001). Shakespeare in Queensland: A cultural-economic approach. In J. Golder & R. Madeleine (Eds.), O Brave New World: Two centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian stage (pp. 218–235). Sydney: Currency Press. Madeleine, R. (2002). As unstable as the King but never daft(?): Texts and variant readings of King Lear. Sydney Studies in Literature, 28, 3–20. Wagner, R. (2017). Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Dir. Barrie Kosky. Cond. Philipp Jordan. DVD. Berlin: Deutsche Grammophon, 00440 073 5450.

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John R. Severn is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, where he collaborates on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the economic and cultural value of theatre in Australia. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical (Routledge 2019) and co-editor with Ulrike Garde of Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (Routledge 2021). From 2017–2020 he was a Macquarie University Research Fellow with a project entitled “Beyond Cultural Borders: Barrie Kosky’s Rethinking of Community in Artistic and Practical Terms”. His wider research covers adaptation, opera, musical theatre and community.

Appendix: Selected Productions by Barrie Kosky

We are grateful to Rainer Simon of the Komische Oper Berlin for contributing information for this list. • Macbeth, William Shakespeare. Treason of Images, Guild Theatre, Melbourne 1985. • Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare. Treason of Images, Guild Theatre, Melbourne 1986. • Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi. Treason of Images, Guild Theatre, Melbourne 1986. • King Lear, William Shakespeare. Treason of Images, Guild Theatre, Melbourne 1987. • La Calisto, Francesco Cavalli. Treason of Images, Guild Theatre, Melbourne 1987. • Don Giovanni, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/The Lulu Plays, Frank Wedekind. Treason of Images, Guild Theatre, Melbourne 1988 (Don Giovanni and The Lulu Plays were performed on alternate days). • The Knot Garden, Michael Tippett. Melbourne Spoleto Festival 1989. • Belshazzar, George Frideric Handel. Treason of Images, Melbourne 1990. • Café Fledermaus. Company B, Belvoir and Playbox Theatre, Melbourne 1990. • The Growing Castle, Malcolm Williamson, after August Strindberg’s A Dream Play. Treason of Images, Theatreworks, Melbourne 1990. • The Barber of Seville, Gioacchino Rossini. Victorian State Opera, touring 1990. • Pierrot Lunaire, Arnold Schoenberg and Whispers, Andrew Ford (double bill). Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney. • The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Victorian State Opera, Playhouse, Melbourne 1991. The Marriage of Figaro (Le Mariage de Figaro), Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon, was staged on alternating nights using the same set. • The Dybbuk, S. Ansky. Gilgul Theatre Company, Town Hall Motors, St Kilda, Melbourne, 1991; The Engine Shop, Eveleigh, Sydney 1993.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2

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• The Emperor Regrets, Therese Radic. Playbox Theatre, Melbourne 1992. • Es brennt. Gilgul Theatre Company, Town Hall Motors, St Kilda, Melbourne 1992; Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney 1993. • Levad. Gilgul Theatre Company, Beckett Theatre, Southbank, Melbourne 1993; Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs, Sydney 1993. • The Golem, Larry Sitsky. Australian Opera, Sydney Opera House 1993. • Oedipus Rex, Igor Stravinsky. Opera Queensland, Brisbane 1993. • Faust, Parts I and II, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Melbourne Theatre Company 1993. • The Oresteia, Liza Lim. Victorian State Opera, Melbourne 1993. • The Wilderness Room. Gilgul Theatre Company, Melbourne 1994. • Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi. Australian Opera, Sydney Opera House 1996. • Der fliegende Holländer (as The Flying Dutchman), Richard Wagner. Australian Opera, Sydney Opera House 1996. • The Operated Jew. Gilgul Theatre Company, Athenaeum Theatre Two, Melbourne 1997. • Tartuffe, Molière. Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Opera House, 1997. • The Burlesque Tour, created by Paul Capsis and Barrie Kosky. Enmore Theatre, Sydney 1998. • King Lear, William Shakespeare. Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company, Melbourne, Sidney, Brisbane, Canberra, 1998. • Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill. Sydney Theatre Company 1998. • Wozzeck, Alban Berg. Opera Australia, Sydney Opera House 1999. • Oedipus, Seneca. Sydney Theatre Company 2000. • There is No Need to Wake Up (devised by the company, drawn from the National Institute of Dramatic Art). Playhouse, Sydney Opera House 2000. • Medea, Euripides. Schauspielhaus Wien, Vienna 2001. • Boulevard Delirium. Schauspielhaus Wien, Vienna 2001, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House 2005. • Jewtopia-Trilogie (Dafke!!, Der verlorene Atem, Das Schloss), Wiener Schauspielhaus 2002. (Der verlorene Atem was performed as The Lost Breath, Atheneum Theatre, Melbourne 2003). • Poppea, after Monteverdi. Wiener Schauspielhaus 2003, Edinburgh Festival 2007, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House 2009. • Le Grand Macabre, György Ligeti. Komische Oper Berlin 2003. • Das verräterische Herz, after Edgar Allan Poe. Wiener Schauspielhaus, Vienna 2004 (as The Tell-Tale Heart, Malthouse, Melbourne, 2007, Carriageworks, Sydney and Edinburgh Festival 2008). • L'Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi. Staatsoper Berlin 2004. • The Tales of Hoffmann (as Hoffmanns Erzählungen), Jacques Offenbach. Wiener Schauspielhaus, Vienna 2005. • Lohengrin, Richard Wagner. Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna 2005. • The Marriage of Figaro (as Die Hochzeit des Figaro), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Komische Oper Berlin 2005.

Appendix: Selected Productions by Barrie Kosky

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• The Lost Echo, Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright after Ovid. Sydney Theatre Company 2006. • Der fliegende Holländer, Richard Wagner. Aalto-Musiktheater, Essen 2006. • Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner. Aalto-Musiktheater Essen 2006. • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (as Ein Sommernachtstraum), Benjamin Britten. Theater Bremen 2006. • Iphigénie en Tauride (as Iphigenia auf Tauris), Christoph Willibald Gluck. Komische Oper Berlin 2007. • Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten. Staatsoper Hannover 2007. • Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Kurt Weill. Aalto-Musiktheater, Essen 2008. • The Women of Troy, Tom Wright after Euripides. Sydney Theatre Company 2008. • The Navigator, Lisa Lim. Brisbane Festival 2008. • Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter. Komische Oper Berlin 2008. • A Dream Play (as Ein Traumspiel), August Strindberg. Deutsches Theater, Berlin 2008. • From the House of the Dead (as Aus einem Totenhaus), Leoš Janáček. Staatsoper Hannover 2009. • Orlando Furioso, Antonio Vivaldi. Theater Basel 2009. • Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi. Komische Oper Berlin 2009. • Das Rheingold, Richard Wagner. Staatsoper Hannover 2009. • Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner. Staatsoper Hannover 2009-2011. • Die Walküre, Richard Wagner. Staatsoper Hannover 2010. • Die schweigsame Frau, Richard Strauss. Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich 2010. • Götterdämmerung, Richard Wagner. Aalto-Musiktheater, Essen 2010. • Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell/Herzog Blaubarts Burg, Béla Bartók (double bill). Oper Frankfurt 2010 (as Dido and Aeneas and Bluebeard’s Castle, Edinburgh Festival 2013, Los Angeles Opera 2014). • Rusalka, Antonín Dvořák. Komische Oper Berlin 2010. • Castor and Pollux, Jean-Philippe Rameau. English National Opera, London 2011. • Siegfried, Richard Wagner. Staatsoper Hannover 2011. • The Merchant of Venice (as Der Kaufmann von Venedig), William Shakespeare. Schauspiel Frankfurt 2012. • Die sieben Todsünden, Kurt Weill. Komische Oper Berlin 2012. • Orpheus, Claudio Monteverdi/Elena Kats-Chernin. Komische Oper Berlin 2012. • Odysseus, Claudio Monteverdi/Elena Kats-Chernin. Komische Oper Berlin 2012. • Poppea, Claudio Monteverdi/Elena Kats-Chernin. Komische Oper Berlin 2012. • The Magic Flute/Die Zauberflöte (in collaboration with the British theatre company 1927), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Komische Oper Berlin, 2012 and worldwide touring. • Armide, Christoph Willibald Gluck. De Nederlandse Oper, Amsterdam 2013. • Ball im Savoy, Paul Ábrahám. Komische Oper Berlin 2013. • West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein. Komische Oper Berlin 2013.

202

Appendix: Selected Productions by Barrie Kosky

• Castor et Pollux, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Komische Oper Berlin 2014. • La Belle Hélène (as Die schöne Helena), Jacques Offenbach. Komische Oper Berlin 2014. • Arizona Lady, Emmerich Kálmán (semi-staged). Komische Oper Berlin 2014. • Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, Oscar Straus. Komische Oper Berlin 2015. • Moses und Aron, Arnold Schoenberg. Komische Oper Berlin 2015. • The Fiery Angel (as Der feurige Engel), Sergei Prokofiev. Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich 2015; as The Fiery Angel, Metropolitan Opera, New York. • The Tales of Hoffmann (as Les Contes d’Hoffmann), Jacques Offenbach. Komische Oper Berlin 2015. • Saul, George Frideric Handel. Glyndebourne Festival 2015, Adelaide Festival 2017. • Eugene Onegin (as Jewgeni Onegin) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Komische Oper Berlin 2016 (as Eugene Onegin, Edinburgh Festival 2019). • Macbeth, Giuseppe Verdi. Opernhaus Zürich 2016. • Carmen, Georges Bizet. Oper Frankfurt 2016, Royal Opera House London 2018. • The Nose, Dimitri Schostakowitsch. The Royal Opera London 2016, Sydney Opera House 2018, Komische Oper Berlin 2018. • Die Perlen der Cleopatra, Oscar Straus. Komische Oper Berlin 2016. • Fiddler on the Roof (as Anatevka), Jerry Bock. Komische Oper Berlin 2017. • Pelléas et Mélisande, Claude Debussy. Komische Oper 2017. • The Fair at Sorochyntsi (as Der Jahrmarkt von Sorotschinzi), Modest Mussorgsky. Komische Oper Berlin 2017. • Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Richard Wagner. Bayreuther Festspiele 2017. • La fanciulla del West, Giacomo Puccini. Opernhaus Zürich 2017. • Candide, Leonard Bernstein. Komische Oper Berlin 2018. • Die Gezeichneten, Franz Schreker. Opernhaus Zürich 2018. • La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini. Komische Oper Berlin 2019. • M: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, Moritz Eggert. Libretto by Barrie Kosky and Ulrich Lenz after Fritz Lang’s film. Direction and lighting by Barrie Kosky. Komische Oper Berlin 2019. • Les Boréades, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opéra de Dijon 2019. • Agrippina, Georg Friedrich Händel. Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich 2019. • Orphée aux enfers, Jacques Offenbach. Salzburger Festspiele, Salzburg 2019. • The Bassarids, Hans Werner Henze. Komische Oper Berlin 2019. • Prince Igor, Alexander Borodin. Paris Opera 2019. • Semele, George Frideric Handel. Komische Oper Berlin 2019. • Dschainah, Paul Ábrahám (semi-staged). Komische Oper Berlin 2019. • Salome, Richard Strauss. Oper Frankfurt 2020. • Frühlingsstürme, Jaromír Weinberger. Komische Oper Berlin 2020. • Boris Godunov, Modest Mussorgsky. Opernhaus Zürich 2020. • La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (as Die Großherzogin von Gerolstein), Jacques Offenbach. Komische Oper Berlin 2020. • Pierrot Lunaire, Arnold Schoenberg, Not I, Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, Samuel Beckett (triple bill). Komische Oper Berlin 2021.

Appendix: Selected Productions by Barrie Kosky

203

• Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss. Bayerische Staatsoper 2021. • The Golden Cockerel (as Le Coq d’or), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Opéra de Lyon 2021.

Index

A Abba, 9 Abbate, C., 131 Abbott, T., 95 Ábrahám, P., 17, 22, 152 Abstract Expressionism, 71, 73 Abu Ghraib, 115, 124, 144 Adams, D., 9 Adaptation, 141 Adelaide Arts Festival, 78 Adelaide Festival, 82–98, 100, 103 Adorno, T.W., 140–142, 160, 170 Aesthetic ideas, 69, 77–79 Akyol, T., 8 Akzeybek, T., 23, 189 Ali Baba und die 40 Räuber, 8 Alkarjousli, M., 8 Allison, J., 151 Allori, A., 139 Alternative für Deutschland, 13, 14 Anatevka, 22 Andrews, B., 54 Anski, S., 66 Antinomianism, 140, 142 Antisemitism, 159–162, 166, 168, 169, 171, 173 Archer, R., 82, 83 Armaganian, N., 124 Armfield, N., 82, 83 Artaud, A., 120 Atkinson, M., 110, 111 Australia Council, 34 Australian National Opera Review 2016, 100–102 Australian Opera, see Opera Australia

B Bacchae, The, 110, 142 Bakhtin, M., 139 Bakopolous-Cooke, N., 124 Ball im Savoy, 5, 6, 9, 17, 152 Barber of Seville, The, 19, 59, 66 Barenboim, D., 164 Barsony, R., 5 Barthes, R., 130 Bauls of Bengal, 86 Bausch, P., 52 Bayerische S., 179 Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 157–159, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 172, 177, 180, 182 Bebay, F., 87 Behle, D., 185 Bell, J., 9, 65, 118, 119, 139 Bell Shakespeare, 64–66, 96, 139, 178, 179 Bell Shakespeare Company, 118, 119 Belshazzar, 18–20, 33, 96 Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, 34, 35, 46, 55, 63, 67 Bennett, J., 107, 111 Benzwi, A., 152 Berg, A., 60 Berlusconi, S., 140 Bernhardt, S., 16 Bernhart, W., 166 Bernstein, L., 62, 63 Berry, M., 163, 173 Between the Acts, 68 Bharucha, R., 54 Bizet, G., 5, 127, 128, 134 Blake, W., 66

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Phillips, J. R. Severn (eds.), Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2

205

206 Blonde Venus, 14 Bohème, La, 4 Bolsonaro, J., 140 Boney M, 9 Bosch, H., 142 Boulez, P., 164 Boyd, C., 51 Bramwell, M., 88, 89, 92 Brecht, B., 61, 106, 178 Bremer Stadtmusikanten, Die, 8 Brookman, R., 90, 91 Bruns, K., 180

C Calisto, La., 19, 66 Candide, 1, 9 Capsis, P., 33 Carlson, M., 11 Carmen, 5, 9, 14, 78 Carmody, J., 18, 96, 171 Carnegie, P., 163 Carnival, 140 Carroll, S., 19 Caruth, C., 109 Castellucci, R., 109 Catharsis, 106, 107, 109–114, 116–121, 150 Character, 41, 42, 44, 45, 105, 106, 109–114, 117–120, 143, 146 Chevalier, N., 9, 133 Cliché, 60, 140, 141, 148 Cole, E., 111, 113 Coleridge, S.T., 68 Conlon, K., 89, 90, 97 Connor, M., 130, 144 Corrigan, P., 5, 32, 34, 40, 45, 47, 52, 67 Così Fan Tutte, 127 Cotter, P., 124 Coward, N., 105 Craven, P., 96, 130 Croggon, A., 19, 51, 64, 65, 124, 126, 144 Cromwell, 140 Crosby, R.B., 140

D Davies, I., 4 Dead Class, The, 52 Delysia, A., 17 Democracy, 140 Demonic, 139 Denes, O., 17 Dennis, D., 158, 161

Index Derrida, J., 94 Dido and Aeneas, 178, 179 Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten, 8 Dietrich, M., 14 Dignam, J., 124 Dilshad Khan, U., 87 Don Giovanni, 67 Dostoevsky, F., 142 Dowland, J., 125, 129–131 Dream Play, A, 61 Duggan, P., 108, 109, 114, 117 Dybbuk, A, 53 Dybbuk Event, A, 53 Dybbuk, The, 24, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39–41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 56, 63, 66, 67, 116

E Eckersall, P., 52 Ecstasy, 146, 147, 149–151, 154 Edinburgh Festival, 78, 82, 95, 178 Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, 17, 21, 152 Emerson, R.W., 68, 69 Emotional identification, 105, 107, 109, 119 Es Brent, 24, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49 Eugene Onegin, 64, 74, 78 Euripides, 110, 115, 117, 124, 125, 128, 142 Eveleigh Railway Yards Sydney, 63 Eveleigh Rail Workshop, Redfern, Sydney, 35 Everyday, The, 138, 144, 146, 147, 152 Exile Trilogy, 35, 39, 43, 45, 50, 52, 54 Expressionism, 69–71, 73

F Fabre, J., 109, 113, 116, 120 Fair at Sorochyntsi, The, 2 Fanciulla del West, La, 4, 14 Faust, Parts 1 and 2, 19 Fellini, F., 66 Fensham, R., 145 Festival d’Avignon, 82 Fiddler on the Roof, see Anatevka Fingesten, P., 140 Fischer-Lichte, E., 148 Fiselier, M., 9 Fisher, E., 9 Fisher, M., 116, 132 Flögel, K.F., 140 Flying Dutchman, The, 50 Ford, A., 123 Forsyth, W., 112 Fosse, B., 5

Index Fotheringham, R., 179 Fox, L., 33, 34, 40–44, 55, 118, 139 Frankfurt Oper, 78 Frankfurt Opera, 14 Frühlingsstürme, 21 Fuchs, E., 120

G Gaden, J., 105 Gallasch, K., 52, 124 Gamsu, N., 124, 129 Garde, U., 7, 178 Geary, J., 125 Gebirtig, M., 35 Geck, M., 159, 160, 166, 168 Genet, J., 18 Gesualdo, C., 125, 129 Gibb, B., 9 Gibbs, A., 114 Gibson, L., 143, 144 Gifillan, D., 132 Gilfillan, D., 124 Gilgul Theatre Company, 18, 19, 24, 31–35, 44, 45, 48–55, 63, 67, 82, 97, 106, 116, 127, 133, 134, 139 Gilman, S., 37 Gluhovic, M., 52 Goebbels, H., 112 Goebbels, J., 159, 162 Goehr, L., 172 Golem, The, 18, 19, 64, 96 Goodwin, J., 116, 132 Gordin, J., 35 Götterdämmerung, 159 Grabowsky, P., 82, 83 Granach, A., 142 Grand Guignol, 142 Gray, E., 33, 34, 42, 55, 67 Green, C., 116 Greenberg, C., 71, 73 Grey, T.S., 160, 161, 168 Groissböck, G., 183, 189 Grotesque, 50, 138–147, 152–154 Grotowski, J., 120 Growing Castle, The, 61 Guantanamo Bay, 115 Guthrie, A.J., 53

H Habima Theatre, 52 Halévy, F., 169

207 Hall, E., 128 Hallett, B., 126, 127, 134 Halliwell, M., 107, 116, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134 Hamilton, E., 124 Handel, G.F., 18, 33 Hanslick, E., 162, 169 Healy, R., 82 Hegel, G.W.F., 147, 148 Helpmann, R., 83 Herman, J., 9 Hersch, S., 53, 54 Hillard, T., 112, 118 Hills Hoist, 88, 93 Hitler, A., 10, 159, 161 Hocking, C., 90, 91 Hohendahl, P.U., 159, 162, 165, 170 Homoki, A., 22 Homosexuality, 68, 95, 96, 152, 153 Horace, 142 Howell, R., 59 HR Pufnstuf, 64 Hugo, V., 140 Humour, 140 Humphries, B., 143 Hunt, C., 83–85, 87–90, 92, 94, 97, 98, 101 Hunter, M.A., 87, 88

I Ibsen, H., 18 Imagination, 62, 64, 66, 74, 78 Iphigenie auf Tauris, 6 Iraq, invastion of, 144

J Jacobs, A., 54 Janet, P., 107 Jewishness, 9, 14, 16–22, 24, 33–35, 37, 40, 43, 44, 50, 51, 53–55, 153 Jolson, A., 9 Jones, A., 69 Judgment, 76–78, 138, 141, 142, 144, 149, 152, 180, 181, 195 Jurisic, M., 8, 9, 124, 130, 154

K Kandinsky, W., 71 Kant, I., 68, 76–78, 147 Kantor, M., 33, 34, 42, 51, 55, 67 Kantor, T., 52, 112, 120

208 Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Prahran, Melbourne, 37 Kath & Kim, 144 Kats-Chernin, E., 8 Kayser, W., 139, 140 Kelly, P., 119 Kelly, V., 53 Kemp, J., 52 Kettle, M., 75 Kickhouse Theatre, 33 Kiernander, A., 118 Killey, A., 89 King Lear, 2, 9, 10, 20, 64–66, 96, 97, 106, 109, 115, 118–120, 133, 139, 145, 178–180 King, P., 52 Kirchner, E.L., 70 Kiss Me, Kate, 154 Knot Garden, The, 4, 19, 62, 68, 69, 73, 78, 88 Koepnick, L., 165, 169 Kolarczyk, A., 189 Koman, J., 8 Komische Oper Berlin, 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 21–24, 78, 82, 102, 103, 133, 137, 152 Konwitschny, P., 163, 169 Kosky in Paradise, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41, 47, 56 Kotcheff, T., 14 Kränzle, J.M., 183 Krasner, L., 71

L Lehmann, H.-T., 45, 112–114, 148 Lehmkuhl, W., 183 Lehrer, R., 31, 33, 40, 41, 45, 56, 116 Lenz, U., 22, 163, 169 Lessing, G.E., 11–13, 153 Levad, 24, 35, 37, 41, 43, 45–47 Levi, H., 169 Levi, J., 37 Levin, D., 4, 161, 163, 166, 172 Ley, G., 130 Lhamo, Y., 86 Light, W., 87 Little, S., 108, 109 Logocentrism, 148 Lohengrin, 151 L’Orfeo, 8, 19 Los Angeles Opera, 178 Lost Breath, The, 133 Lost Echo, The, 2, 20, 51, 105–107, 109–116, 120, 124, 133, 142, 154 Lucas, F.L., 107 Lulu, 67

Index M Macbeth, 19 Madeleine, R., 178 Magee, E., 183 Magic Flute, The, 78, 92 Mahler, G., 62, 63, 66 Maids, The, 18 Mailman, D., 9, 65 Malthouse Theatre Melbourne, 43, 47, 53, 55, 124 Manon, C., 8, 9 Mantchylak, S., 87 Manzel, D., 4 Märchen im Grand Hotel, 22 Mark Morris Dance Company, 85 Marriage of Figaro, The, 19, 78 Marsh, J., 4 Martin, C., 108, 116 McCallum, J., 107, 112, 118, 124, 129 McClatchie, S., 158, 164, 173 McElhinney, H., 110, 111, 114, 119 McMillan, S., 5 Mehrling, K., 5 Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Die, 75, 157–165, 168, 169, 171–173, 177, 179–181, 183, 187, 196 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, 96 Melbourne Spoleto Festival, 4, 19, 62, 67, 68, 78 Melbourne Theatre Company, 19 Mendelssohn, F., 169 Menotti, G.C., 96 Menschenhass und Reue, 16 Merman, E., 132 Messianism, 142, 148, 150 Metamorphoses, 105, 110, 124, 142 Metropol-Theater Berlin, 21, 152 Meyerbeer, G., 169 Meyerhold, V., 120 Meyrick, J., 33, 54 Millington, B., 158 Mill, J.S., 68 Mimesis, 107, 111, 117 Minor, R., 6 Mireleh Efros, 35 Modernism, 139 Molière, 8 Monteverdi, C., 8 Monteverdi Trilogy, The, 8 Moomba Festival Melbourne, 95 Moriarty, K., 118 Morley, M., 93 Morrison, P., 50

Index Moses und Aron, 94 Mother of Pearl, see Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will! Mount Olympus, 113, 114 Mozart, W.A., 60, 127 Multiculturalism, 11 Murnau, F.W., 142 Muroyama, K., 9 Mystery, 54, 62, 65, 67, 69, 74, 76, 78, 79

N Nabucco, 50, 96, 126, 138 Naglestad, C., 4 Napolitano, M., 125 Narrative, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116–120, 146 Nathan der Weise, 153 Nathan, I., 37 National theatre, 11, 12, 15 Naturalism, 183 Nazism, 10, 16, 21, 66, 152, 153, 158, 159, 162, 164, 170, 173, 181, 192 Nero, Roman Emperor, 142 Nevin, R., 115, 117, 119, 124, 128–130 Nose, The, 99 Nosferatu (1922), 142 Nostalgia, 141 Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946, 180, 191, 195 Nylund, C., 183

O O’Connell, C., 18, 74 Odysseus, 8 Oedipus Rex, 19, 138 Offenbach, J., 5, 169 On Ecstasy, 62, 63, 146 Opera Australia, 23, 99–102, 126, 138 Opera Queensland, 19, 139 Operated Jew, The, 24, 37, 38, 40, 45, 46, 49, 50 Operetta, 152, 153 Oper Frankfurt, 178 Orel, R., 8, 9 Oresteia, The, 19 Orpheus in the Underworld, 138 Osborne, M., 95 Ovid, 105, 110, 124, 142 OzOpera, 92

P Page, S., 82, 83 Panizza, O., 37

209 Pappendell, G., 4 Papperitz, G., 169 Parody, 141 Parsifal, 169 Parveen Sultana, B., 87 Payne, P., 49 Pearl Fishers, The, 127 Pearson, C., 88, 94, 95, 97, 101 Performance studies, 108, 117 Perkovic, J., 132 Perlen der Cleopatra, D., 4 Phelan, P., 107, 108 Playbox Theatre, 34, 35, 43 Pollock, J., 71–73 Poppea, 2, 133, 154 Porter, C., 9, 111 Postdramatic theatre, 112–114, 120, 147, 148 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 109 Prior, Y., 63, 67, 106 Psychoanalysis, 107 Puccini, G., 5, 14, 60 Purcell, H., 2, 178 Purves, C., 4

Q Queen, 9 Queensland Theatre Company, 96, 139, 178, 179

R Radic, L., 18, 64, 96 Realism, 64, 74 Regieoper, 180 Regietheater, 150, 163, 172 Reichmann, K., 21 Repetition, 106–114, 116–120, 177–182, 187, 189, 190 Representation, 151 Revolution, 141 Richards, A., 32, 39, 43, 44, 51–54, 106 Richardson, M., 110, 111 Rich, C., 132 Riley, G., 144 Rimbaud, A., 139 Ring des Nibelungen, Der, 158 Ringst, R., 180, 182 Rischbieter, H., 152 Ristori, A., 16 Romeo and Juliet, 179 Romney, J., 66 Rosenfeld, L., 35 Rossini, G., 66 Rowling, K., 124

210 Royal Opera House, London, 14, 78 Rusalka, 2 Rymer, M., 33, 34, 42, 49, 54

S Said, E., 172 Sako, D., 8 Salzburg Festival, 138 Salzman, E., 125, 130, 131 Saul, 2, 4 Schapira, H.W., 21 Schauspielhaus Vienna, 82 Schiller, F., 12 Schleef, E., 109 Schoenberg, A., 94 Schofield, L., 96 Schrödl, J., 113 Schumann, R., 125 Schwanewilms, A., 183 Schweigsame Frau, D., 5, 179 Scobie, I., 89 Sefton, D., 82 Selam Opera!, 23 Sellars, P., 83, 131 Şendil, A.K., 8 Sequin, 137–139, 142, 145, 153 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashly Cooper, Third Earl of, 147 Shakespeare, W., 5, 9, 12, 73, 179 Sharman, J., 83 Shay, L., 116, 132 Sheehy, B., 82, 83 Siebs, T., 13 Siegfried, 162 Sinatra, N., 86 Sitsky, L., 18 Skramstad, P.-E., 165, 166 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, 117 Sollich, R., 158, 162, 165, 172 Song Company, The, 86 Sosulski, M.J., 12, 13 Spectacle, 139, 146, 147, 152, 180 Spence, S., 94, 95 Spira, F., 22 Split Britches, 55 Spoleto Festival Melbourne, 96 Spotts, F., 159, 168 Sprengel, P., 152 Sprinkle, A., 86 Spunner, S., 50 Stanislavski, K., 150 Star Wars, 66

Index State Theatre Adelaide, 85 Stone, S., 54 Straus, O., 17, 152 Strauss, R., 5, 179 Streisand, B., 9 Strindberg, A., 61 Studio Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, 62 Sydney Front, The, 52 Sydney Theatre Company, 8, 18, 55, 105, 115, 124, 127, 142, 144 Symbolism, 19, 20, 50, 60, 64, 67, 68, 73, 75–79

T Tag, K.L., 5 Tannhäuser, 158 Tartuffe, 8, 9, 50 Taylor, R., 68, 71, 73 Tell-Tale Heart, The, 133 Tempest, The, 73 Temple, S., 139 Tenores di Bitti, 87 Teresa of Ávila, 146 Theatreworks Melbourne, 33, 53 Thompson, H., 49 Throat Singers of Tuva, 87 Throsby, D., 10 Till, N., 134 Tippett, M., 4, 62, 68, 78 Tivoli Theatre Sydney, 17 Town Hall Motors, St Kilda, Melbourne, 35, 40, 45–47 Tragedia Engonidia, 117 Transnational, 7–10, 12–14, 17, 18, 22, 24, 66, 153, 182 Trauma, 106–113, 116–120 Treason of Images, 18, 33, 49, 65, 66, 81, 93 Trezise, B., 108, 109, 117 Trial of God, The, 35 Trojan Women, The, 115, 124 Trump, D., 140 Truscott, J., 96 Truth, 138, 139 Turner, J., 143, 144 Twelfth Night, 179 2001: A Space Odyssey, 66

U Uffizi gallery, 139 Upton, A., 18

Index V Vaget, H., 162, 166 Van Beethoven, L., 9, 139, 178 Van den Berg, K., 171, 172 Van der Kolk, B., 107 Van der Zandt, Q., 124, 129 Verdi, G., 96, 126, 169 Verfremdungseffekt, 105 Victorian State Opera, 19, 59 Viktoria und ihr Husar, 17, 18 Vilna Troupe, 66, 139 Vogt, K.F., 186, 190 Volle, M., 183 von Goethe, J.W., 84 von Kotzebue, A., 16 von Lenbach, F., 184 von Sternberg, J., 14 Vuletic, J., 124, 129, 133

W Wagner, C., 159 Wagner, K., 158, 164–167, 169–173 Wagner, R., 60, 75, 76, 151, 157–173, 180–184, 186, 190–192, 195 Wagner, W., 159, 168, 173 Wake, C., 108, 109 Wake in Fright, 14 Wald, C., 119 Wallis, D., 116, 125, 133, 134 Wedekind, F., 67

211 Weinberger, J., 21 Weiner, M.A., 159 Wherrett, R., 96 Whirling Dervishes of Konya, 86 Wielopole, Wielopole, 52 Wiesel, E., 35 Wilderness Room, The, 18–20, 24, 37–39, 42, 43, 45, 54 Williamson, M., 61 Willich, C., 192 Winter’s Tale, The, 179 Witnessing, 46, 108, 150 Women of Troy, The, 20, 106, 107, 109, 114–120, 124–134, 144 Wonder, E., 112 Woolfe, Z., 170 Woolf, V., 68 Wooster Group, The, 52 Wordsworth, W., 68 Wright, T., 33, 34, 42, 43, 53, 55, 67, 105, 115, 117, 124–130, 133, 142

Y Yiddish Queen Lear, The, 35

Z Žižek, S., 161 Zwierko, A., 9 Zycher, R., 33