The Language of Theatre

When I was still living in Denmark, I remember going to a local theatre to see Macbeth. This particular version of Macbeth was performed by a visiting Japanese theatre company, and included puppetry as well as actors. I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening and remembering coming away from the experience with images I still remember today. In London, many regular visiting companies regularly perform a huge range of plays from Shakespeare to new writing in an array of different languages. These events are almost always oversubscribed, the interest in foreign language plays clearly on the rise; and rightly so: Theatre, being the amalgamation of the visual and the spoken, remains an international language. Hearing a familiar line spoken in a foreign language with its different vowel and consonant sounds often opens up a completely new way of understanding or experiencing that same line. Where we fail to understand the spoken word because of the unfamiliar language we tune our senses in more acutely to what we see before us. Thus, it can be more enriching to watch a play in a foreign language as we are less prone to sit back and relax and let it come to us. Foreign Language Theatre demands active viewing and is not always an easy task, but if you invest in it you often come away with lasting impressions, as the one left me by the Japanese Macbeth many years ago.

Which is why the task set us by our producers, American Drama Group Europe is a hard one: Although we perform in Theatres, our main audience (the bread and butter of the company) is still that most fickle and enigmatic of audiences: The Teenager.
Moreover, because our play demands more engagement (being performed in French) this is often an audience that we are struggling with; there are different elements in this struggle:

• First is the willingness: One of the premises of theatre is that the audience is willing to be there and willing to listen. In our case this is not always the case.

Much to our credit and our director’s we almost always manage to draw them in, in spite of their sometimes openly voiced reticence. Still, many of them have been told to go and so between a maths lesson and a “boring” French play, well guess what they opt for?

• Then there is the engagement:  Foreign language theatre plays demand engagement and concentration. Most young people nowadays need constant stimulation and cannot sustain their concentration for more than a couple of minutes. ( see my forthcoming entry “ generation X-BOX” )

So this is our daily task; Mostly we are quite successful, sometimes it is an uphill struggle to “save teenage souls” in spite of themselves.

58 Movies: nothing on!

The thing we have come to miss the most while on the road, has been English language movies. Germany, along with Spain, Italy and France are the only European countries left (to my knowledge) where dubbing still applies. All TV shows, and most Feature films are dubbed. Here is a quote from an article from the Goethe Institute’s website:

“In no other country in the world are so many films dubbed for the cinema and TV screens as in Germany. The preference for dubbed German versions of international productions has given birth to an industry with its own professions, which have to deal with the issue of remaining faithful to the original – and at times with sceptics “

More info on the dubbing history in Germany can be found at: http://www.goethe.de/kug/kue/flm/dos/en218244.htm

Now off course, this is excellent news for the large contingent of German actors working within this industry, but for tourists, it’s a constant irritation if you do not know the language. Only in major towns like Berlin, Hamburg are you able to find cinemas that show feature films in their original versions, and even then the selection is usually limited to a few films and odd screening times. When we are in smaller cities, the suggestion of going to the movies usually gets a laugh from everyone and then we resign ourselves to watching James Bond in German on the TV.

However, from my own experience of picking up languages I can only say that when you hear a language it is usually easier to retain: “Upstairs Downstairs” “When The Boat Comes In” “The Professionals”, “The A-Team” ,were all series that helped me achieve better English when I was a kid, because they were shown on TV and at the movies in original languages and subtitles allowed me to understand words that I didn’t know. Subtitles are just a question of habbit, but then off course if the Germans started reading subtitles, what would all the German actors do ?

The acidental tourist

Göttingen, Rosenheim, Stuttgart, Ingolstadt, Chemnitz, Lübeck, Paderborn, Marburg, Hannover, and tonight Lüdenscheid.
In the last 2 weeks we have it seems seen a lot of towns, but in fact it has been more the case of being accidental tourist. And that is the main frustration about being on tour in a country that you have not visited before: You pass through all these beautiful towns, and their sights and sounds keep taunting you as you pass through them with barely enough time to check in at the hotel, grab something to eat then make your way to the theatre for that evenings show, the next day we repeat the story. We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not on holiday but working…. So a lot of times we content ourselves with the thought that we still have some great cities in store .We had a nice day and a half in Berlin in preparation for the 5 days we will spend there in December. The weather is getting colder now, and I have just bought a hat and gloves in preparation for the cold that will be here shortly….what am I saying that is here NOW!!
There are new pictures uploaded on Flickr and I will try to write new post on as soon as I can.

Goodbye to the Fabrik !

I may have seemed overly enthusiastic yesterday about The Fabrik. I guess the vip treatment and the perks got the better of me; Overall our shows there (last one this morning) have suffered from the fact that this space is only used for concert at nights. The skylight completely blew away any intentions of making the same kind of magic as we do in normal theatres. This has been slightly better at night, although the very small stage has meant improvising and cutting where needed.
As it is already hard enough to draw in a audience of reluctant teenagers (and these do make out the main body of our audience) in a normal theatre, it has been nigh impossible to create the same sort of enchantment during our day performances there.
So our day performances at the Fabrik have definitely felt as if we were selling the same product to people but without all the nice packaging.

The night performances have been better, that said the audience has also been more adult. I guess everything was redeemed today as we got our free ticket for tonight’s concert with Chuck Berry! (Yes I am easily bought!) . And to finish it all off we added to the graffiti and left our mark on the changing room wall (see above pick) and who knows….Maybe Chuck Berry knows the story and will notice it and ask us round for drinks…..

But for now it’s the week-end in Hamburg...
For more pictures of us at the Fabrik check out flickr as usual...

Le Petit Prince...followed by CHUCK BERRY ?!

yes it's true we were warm up act for Chuck Berry ( so to speak !)

Hello again!

Iam sitting in the backstage area of The Fabrik in Hamburg. The walls are completely covered with grafitti...not a very nice sight normally if it weren't for the fact that the people who have been writting on the wall are for eksample: Spyro Gyra, Mezzoforte, Aimee Mann, The Ethiopians....all bands that have played here..for the Fabrik is one of Hamburgs oldest Rock Venues..strange place to stage a play I hear you say..well it certainly has its difficulties : a small stage, and no blackout possibillities during our daytime shows, and very hot Rock lamps..( for those who are technically minded I can tell you that theatres use slightly different lamps from Rock venues, basically rock concerts are always lit from behind on stage ) but anyway, let's look at the perks: I am sat in the same dressing room as Chuck Berry will be sat in tomorrow ! Yes that's right ..my claim to fame..so far..we are getting free drinks ( non alcoholic ) in a fridge backstage and fresh coffe and croissants in the morning ...Who said rockn' roll was all about drugs and sex? And the final perk: we got free tickets to see Chuck Berry tomorrow how cool is that !? He is playing here tomorrow evening. If you want to find out more about the place go to

http://www.fabrik.de/en/fabrik/ .

So although we have had to amend the show for our daylight audiences, the one evening show we had last night was good and the audience was very responsive.

Warning mutations !!

Just a little post from our hotel in Deminhorst, where a hotel sign asking you to save the environment by not having your towels washed everyday just doesn't do it for me: it looks like ET already has mutated into something QUITE DIFFERENT !! UAAAAAAHHH!!

On to Hamburg !

Hello from the ice cafe in Delmenhorst

It is strange when you are on tour…this time last week we were in Bayreuth in the strange 70’s Hotel, and this week we are near Munich, in between performances at the Kleines Haus Theatre. Audience this morning was rather chatty, and did not seem to understand much a lot of them were quite young as well, which doesn’t always help.
We are in Delmenhorst a suburb of Bremen and tonight after the show we are driving into Hamburg. Weather is getting colder, but we still have lots of sunshine but no doubt that will change, we are November now and I haven’t yet
used any of the thermal wear that I have packed…no doubt that that will change. We had a nice week-end in Munich! Went to see the Bavarian Film studios were apparently Dustin Hoffman had just been filming Patrick Suskind’s Perfume. Pictures will be available soon on Flickr. I am still trying to upload movies to my blog as the ones that I take with my camera a quite good.

Talking Swiss

Nice view but where are we playing ?! (the gymnasium at Sarganz)

I notice I have not mentioned our shows in Switzerland: This is mainly because the Swiss did not impress me much: We arrived late in Zurich after a long drive, and had to do a get in at he Opera house, sound posh I know but we were playing the downstairs CABARET venue and poor Fillipo was only given one technician to help him out and had to do most of the lights himself. The venue itself (pics on Flikcr)
Is mainly used as a cabaret venue and although it has a stage and some lights, the fact that the audience are sat at individual small round tables and are served drinks by a flood of waiters makes for quite a different occasion than what we had to offer.
Theatre requires engagement from the audience…..language theatre even more so but when the audience is sat a tables that encourages disengagement from what is going on stage (and this does work well for lighter cabaret shows) it becomes very hard work.. The clatter of crockery and glasses does not go well with our somewhat more emotional scenes.
Therefore, I think audiences were among the least responsive so far, hard when you have a show that is actually full of laughs. The following day we drove to Sarganz Gymnasium and played a school hall (they had promised us a theatre) this left everyone with a bad taste in the mouth and we did a quick show...although some of the audience seemed to enjoy it. Then we left Switzerland..all in all , you will agree not the best experience…and we did not even get to try a Swiss fondue..