It is customary for the director to write a short “note” which will serve to give some insight to the audience as to his “view” of the play, his goals and intentions. However, such a “note” carries the danger of predisposing the audience, of narrowing their imagination and diminishing their receptiveness. That is something that I would like to avoid. I don’t believe in the stating of intentions but in the final product itself. Because in the end, the intention will be vindicated by the end result. I shall attempt, therefore, to place the spectator at the beginning of road, as “lightly” as possible.

 

The beginning of the play is realistic. The scenery is also realistic; the nature of the characters familiar. Their meeting occurs for a perfectly ordinary reason; a trip to the theatre. An invitation to a performance. At first the two characters come up against one another. However the conflict between them is superficial. They appear to have something in common. As time passes, their differences emerge, their fears, their worries, death. The reasons why they cannot enter into a normal dialogue come to the surface. Whatever they keep inside themselves is now coming to a climax. The obstacle, the deeper “scene” of the play, is History. History which involves them either directly or indirectly, which carries them away, which disguises them and turns them upside down. History which we feel is being played again, onstage, and which will lead them to their deepest truths. To a massive guilt. Of course the play could only superficially be branded as historical, seeing as History is a means by which to face reality, or the only reality as  claimed by these two people. And their guilt shall drive them into a union, into a connection. In the end that which appeared to be just a minor detail, their relationship with the Theatre, even without their presence, transforms and repositions itself as it looks as if it is entering the very core of the issue, without, however, providing any particular answer or any particular position.  And all this in a storm as it rages.

 

 

Nathan Goldring, a young Austrian director, suggests to Theo Steiner, an iconic figure of Viennese Theatre of the Post-War Era, that they should put an end to twenty five years of absence and silence and stage King Lear in Berlin.

For what reason does the figure of the old king in his decline turn the ex actor back over half a century, to the Terezin Ghetto?

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools” says Lear.

“Any attempt at writing, directing, acting, in a retrospect of the Holocaust, can but fail.

 We cannot tell the tale of six million beings. And six million dead. Each one of those dead is a part of those six million and can only be understood as a part of the mass extermination of the Jews of Europe. An individual story means isolation, which is at the same time an acute loss and a betrayal of all the others. Suppression of the facts, on the other hand, is simply a regression into a superficial world dedicated to the pursuit of worldly comforts, of oblivion, of the frenzied crowd and domestic kitsch – the world of the common executioners of destruction, that of maximum efficiency – six million Jews of Europe, subjects of the Final Solution, that did not fail.

 

Whatever remains human within us is offered to this inability to chronicle the stories of failure of our fellow human beings. Without a doubt this is the cost of the durability of this particular exchange, which remains active within the theatre: failure should not be hidden, from the very beginning of the poem. Nothing must be kept in silence. We begin with this.

 

Toujour l’orage was written and directed at a cross-roads of very particular significance, where the questions surrounding the meaning of Jewish identity, personal accounts, and artistic processes mingle together in their diversity. This remains the broad plan of the Theatre of words, of contemplation – a political theatre, if you like, in the way that it deliberately addresses a public which is treated as a sum of its members – a theatre of memory – a theatre of contemplation”.

 

 

 

LEAR’S SHADOW BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Karl Kraus

 

On a freezing night, during the end of the 20th century, on an isolated farm, somewhere in the French countryside, forty year old Nathan Goldring, future director of Neue Bühne in Berlin, visits 76 year old Theo Steiner, the famous actor who suddenly disappeared from the Vienna theatre scene, to suggest to him the role of King Lear. 13 acts, each one with a title taken from a phrase in the Shakespearean tragedy.

 

Steiner refuses categorically. An aggressive game of chess will be played out between the two men, with words as pawns, alternating between harshness, humour, irony and cynicism. Along the way we will learn that the Jewish actor had played the role of Edgar in 1944, at the Terezin concentration camp where the Nazis “encouraged” the confined artists to practice their craft – music, operetta, theatre. And how, in this way, earning the favour of the Untersturmfürer, he bought out his life in exchange for having his family sent to Auschwitz to be executed. Finally the old hermit will confess his guilt, in the most painful of ways, whilst Goldring will accept the decision of the great actor to never act again, and in turn acquire a conscience of his own repressed Jewish identity.  He might even remain faithful to it, far from any theatre in the service of the powers that be. “servant to which new savagery, I wonder, shall the court jester be?” Perhaps Terezin lives on, beyond history, in every theatre hall?

 

Theatre of words, political theatre, theatre of memory, reflection upon the power of words, that is the work by Enzo Cormann. Toujours l’orage, apart from being a play for the theatre, sheds light upon the darkest corners of history and impressively outlines the issue of the transmission of the traumatic events of the Shoah to the next generation. “When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”.

 

Enzo Cormann. Writer and dramaturge. His works are available in France from Éditions de Minuit, Théâtrales, Actes Sud…, and have been translated into over ten languages. Story teller and singer, he records and plays with various jazz groups and with the saxophonist, Jean-Marc Padovani.

He has recorded radio novels for France Culture, as a writer (twelve works), interpreter and co-producer.

He collaborated with the Strasbourg National Theatre, the Valence Drama Centre and was the literary consultant to the Célestins Theatre of Lyon. He taught at the École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique in Strasbourg and at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon.