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

Theatre 299
This opening moment of Thomas Ostermeier’s radical 2015 production of Shakespeare’s Richard III does not take place
with Richard giving his famous soliloquy to the audience; rather it is an explosion (literally) of thousands of gold and silver
shavings, falling not only over an elegant black-tie celebration of English royals, but over the thousand-seat audience
of the Avignon Opera House—one of the three main stages of the world-famous Avignon Theatre Festival. The play was
performed in German (it had opened at the Berlin Schaubühne) and with French subtitles, but Lars Eidinger, playing the
title role, broke into English colloquialisms—and even ad libs to the audience—from time to time, entertaining his crowd
while exasperating his supposed colleagues. © BORIS HORVAT/AFP PHOTO/Getty Images
Other western European countries—particularly Spain,
Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium,
and the Netherlands—also have extremely active theatre
communities and their own legendary actors and directors.
And they too are wonderful places to engage in the theatre
of the present and see a glimpse of the theatre of the future.
The most exciting theatre in Europe today, however,
according to many observers, is in Eastern Europe. Because
the theatres of Eastern European countries faced strict
government censorship from 1945 until the early 1990s,
their playwrights weren’t allowed to talk directly about
current events. And so directors, rather than writers, took
the lead in creating a form of dangerous theatre to express
subversive ideas. The directors mounted classical plays to
avoid any scrutiny. What Communist party official, after
all, would dare complain about a director who wanted to
stage a 2,000-year-old Greek tragedy? But these directors
made these ancient plays newly relevant. As a result, Eastern
European directors created a theatre of ancient plays
produced with hidden, often subversive, meanings clear to
intelligent audiences but lost on the government. Indeed,
the Eastern European theatre played a major role in the
sweeping away of Communist rule in the Soviet bloc, particularly
in Czechoslovakia, where in 1989 the “Velvet Revolution”
led by Václav Havel, a prominent dissident Czech
playwright, brought about the overthrow of the Communist
government and the election of Havel as president.
Within Eastern Europe, the country of Romania
deserves special recognition, because, with a population
smaller than that of Texas, it has produced an extraordinary
collection of world-famous directors. Andre Serban,
Mihai Maniutiu, Gábor Tompa, and Silviu Purcarete
have international reputations for innovative brilliance
and creativity. “In the field of directing, it is not Romania