German Theatre Torture

I am a theatre buff and some of my earliest childhood memories are of being taken to the theatre in Johannesburg. One of the joys of living in Germany is its rich theatre tradition. Even a small city like Trier with its 100,000 inhabitants has a small tripartite theatre.

However despite the money being spent on the physical structures, I believe that the vast majority of German actors are lousy. The biggest torture for anyone coming from the Anglo-Saxon world is to watch original English-language plays being performed in German, especially Shakespeare.

As far as I am concerned most German actors just can’t do Shakespeare or any monologues. If they are angry they scream and if they are emotional or moved they whisper that you can’t hear a word of what they say in the third row from the front. I don’t know whether it is the language or their training but German actors just don’t know how to use the variety in their vocal cords. They obviously have never been trained in the subtle differences of monologues: for them it is just all a rant.

Recently I attended the opening night of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey Into Night in the Theatre in Trier. It was an experience which can only be described as pure theatre torture with all those monologues, while I was looking surreptitiously at my watch, checking how much longer I had to endure. Even drinking a glass of Sekt during the interval did nothing to shorten the torture. My daughter and I left the backslapping first night party in a great hurry.

Now a university student reading English, my daughter had to remind me how watching Hamlet in the same theatre a few years ago nearly put her off Shakespeare for life. All that ranting and fake emotion.

And then last night we watched Romeo and Juliet performed by the American Drama Group in Europe and TNT Britain. English actors, performing Shakespeare. What a pleasure, what a joy to watch! Sitting next to Irish and New Zealand friends, we laughed aloud, we chuckled and smiled and we were moved by the poetry of the language in those soliloquies and monologues of Shakespeare’s Verona. And maybe it is the cultural differences – yes even a drama like Romeo and Juliet has its funny moments and yes one is allowed to laugh. My dear Germans, I get the impression theatre is either serious drama for you - no laughs allowed - or satire and comedy. But never the twain should meet.

The two hour Romeo and Juliet performance was over far too soon. We walked out of the theatre, coming from different Continents in the English-speaking world; all smiles at such a world class performance. 'Tonic for the soul', my Irish friend called it. Just a pity I did not see any of the Trier theatre’s German actors in the audience – they could have learnt a lot from this classy performance.