Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

298 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
Set in an African graveyard, Athol Fugard’s
The Train Driver tells of the anguished Roelf
Visagie (right), a white train engineer whose
locomotive has unintentionally run over and
killed a woman and her baby. Seeking to
uncover what might be her gravesite, Roelf
meets up with the cemetery’s local black
caretaker, Simon Hanabe, and the two have
a ninety-minute discourse that quickly leads
to the horrors and hatreds of South African
racism, political apartheid, and desperate
human poverty—particularly in areas such as
Hanabe’s. New York’s 2012 Signature Theatre
production was directed by the playwright;
Ritchie Coster played Roelf Leon and Addison
Brown played Simon. The grimy setting was
designed by Christopher H. Barreca. © Sara
Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
contemporary medicine opened at Sydney’s Ensemble
Theatre in 2011) and Louis Nowra (The Emperor of Sydney
in 2007) have long flooded that country’s stages with
provocative plays. They are now supplemented by a host
of younger writers who flourish in both standard repertory
and offbeat, alternative theatres in Melbourne, Sydney, and
Brisbane—as well as at Australia’s biennial Adelaide Arts
Festival.
And South Africa has given the world one of its most
prominent living playwrights, Athol Fugard, whose Sizwe
Banzi Is Dead, The Island, Master Harold . . . and the
Boys, A Lesson from Aloes, Valley Song, My Children!
My Africa!, and Playland, most of which premiered at
the Market Theatre of Johannesburg. Both Fugard and
the Market Theatre have won their reputations not only
for the outstanding quality of their work but also for their
courageous and effective confrontation of that country’s
now-concluded policy of apartheid. In the post-apartheid
era, Fugard has written new plays, often autobiographical,
dealing with his continuing struggles to reconcile contemporary
Africa with both its roots and its future; these
include the notable Valley Song (1996) and its sequel,
Coming Home (2009). Now living in California, his The
Train Driver opened in Los Angeles in 2010 and went on
to play in London, earning rave reviews in both venues.
For travelers willing to manage a foreign language,
France and Germany—the countries that spawned
the theatre of the absurd and the theatre of alienation,
respectively—are immensely rewarding theatre destinations.
Each country provides an outstanding mix of
traditional and original theatre. French and German theatre,
like that of most European countries, enjoys strong
government support, which keeps ticket prices at a fraction
of what they are in the United States and England.
France has five fully supported national theatres. Four
of them are in Paris—including the historic Comédie-
Française, founded in 1680 out of the remains of Molière’s
company shortly after his death; the Odéon, now a “Theatre
of Europe,” presenting home-based plays as well as
productions from around the continent; and the Théâtre du
Chaillot, which focuses on new plays and dance pieces.
In Germany, where major dramatic activity is spread
more broadly throughout the country, federal and city
governments support more than 150 theatres, and about
sixty theatre festivals, in just about every large city on
the map. The modern German theatre, whose brash,
experimental style of most productions takes off from
the influence of Bertolt Brecht, is considered revolutionary
in its breaking of theatrical stage conventions.
German directors Peter Stein, Matthais Langhoff, Claus
Peymann, Thomas Ostermeier, Karin Henkel, and Frank
Castorf have pioneered in theatrical innovations that
have influenced theatres around the world. In addition
to the Berliner Ensemble, currently headed by Peymann,
Berlin boasts Castorf’s radical Volksbühne and each
May mounts an annual Theatertreffen (Theatre Meeting),
bringing what a jury of critics selects as the ten best
German-language theatre productions (out of the 400
they evaluate) from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Theatertreffen productions are chosen almost entirely for
their innovative direction and design, and for their contribution
to the future of theatre in the German-speaking
world. Attending such events puts the audience in contact
with the most adventurous theatre in western Europe.