I was moderating a panel on Staging Woyzeck with Katharina Stoll from the collective Glossy Pain and Lily Sykes, resident director at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, but I also had the opportunity to see a lot of work by up-and-coming European talent.
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The festival brings together artists from across Europe and this year audiences could watch work from Germany, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, Norway, Belgium and Finland. The audience is seated around a white platform, under a lighting rig that descends from the ceiling. This is more of a riff on Chekhov, than an adaptation.
The audience are invited to come closer to the platform, to take a ringside seat, as it were, as platters of cherries are laid out on the table and shots of kirsch liqueur are distributed.
Lund clearly likes bodily business. Actors scoff noodles, vomit on the stage, and one performer cradles a samovar because obviously there's a samovar at her bare breast. By the end the cast are wearing little but their underwear, their skin stained red, the stage coated in oatmeal-textured faux-vomit. For all its physical intensity β at one point two actors writhe and grapple for an extended period β the production has longueurs. The sequences when the cast dole out glasses or create the estate on the tabletop using dolls house furniture are drawn-out, but not in a way that feels purposeful.
