Shakespeare Theatre

Renate Heitmann from the Bremen Shakespeare Company was kind enough to answer some questions about the Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare.

 

What made you decide to found the Shakespeare Company here in Bremen back then?

 

Bremen was the city that some of the founding members had got to know during an engagement at the Theater am Goetheplatz in the 1970s during the directorship of the legendary Kurt Hübner. They remembered Bremen's audience as very open and curious, and so Bremen was chosen as the location for the theatre's founding. According to the motto of the Bremen Town Musicians: "You can find something better than death anywhere, let's go to Bremen...".

 

Why Shakespeare in particular? 

 

These actors and actresses, Hille Darjes, Chris Alexander, Rainer Iwersen, Renato Grünig, Norbert Kentrup and others, worked together on William Shakespeare's Othello at the Landestheater Castrop Rauxel in the early 1980s. For this work, they intensively studied Shakespeare's time, the Renaissance and the Globe in London. It was like an epiphany for them: Shakespeare's theatre was a theatre for everyone in his time - an absolutely democratic model. You went to the theatre to be entertained and you learned how drama and current events were connected in the improvised scenes of the actors! Moreover, in Shakespeare's time, the Globe Theatre was a theatre where everyone went, the baker as well as the queen.

 

What is your personal favourite Willliam Shakespeare play? 

 

Hamlet - a real thriller and such brilliant and profound monologues!

 

Shakespeare's language, what is fascinating about it? 

 

If you take poetry literally, as condensed experience and meaning in language, you're already close. Then there is the sound and the rhythm. Shakespeare was a brilliant connoisseur of people and their feelings, which is why his language still speaks to us so much today. He "condensed" the essentials in verse in a timeless way. Numerous aphorisms that we use as a matter of course in our everyday language today are by Shakespeare: "There was the wish father of the thought", "that was the nightingale and not the lark", "to be or not to be..." etc.

 

Is there a young audience for Shakespeare's theatre? 

 

To this day, it is very rare to graduate from high school without Shakespeare, even in Germany-that's why we have a lot of students who come to us and for whom we also offer a specific workshop programme. In addition, there is a young audience with an affinity for theatre in the city who attend our performances - that's about 20% of our audience.

Have there been attempts to translate Shakespeare's works into a modern language, or would that take away the character, the specialness, of his works? 

 

When we read Shakespeare translations from the different centuries today, we quickly realise that each translation is linked to the language and the zeitgeists of its own time. The early 19th century Romantic translations were actually censored versions. The translators Schlegel/Tieck simply deleted a great many crude and sexual allusions from Shakespeare's work. I could respond with a Hamlet quote, "In itself nothing is good or evil, it is thinking that makes it so."  It depends on the expectation and that is subjective.

 

Can you say something about the International Shakespeare Festival? 

 

For me personally, Shakespeare's dramas and his language are world theatre- most of the plots of his dramas are myths that exist in quite a lot of cultures. All his dramas are about characters struggling with their feelings: love, desire, envy, revenge, anger, jealousy, joy, forgiveness-a story like Romeo and Juliet, where love is supposed to be taboo because the different origins are not socially tolerated, exists on every continent. Hamlet's conflict with his uncle, who killed his father in order to marry his mother, is equally cross-cultural ... 

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You also perform other plays, more modern ones. How do these relate to Shakespeare's plays? 

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Shakespeare is the sun in our universe - when we put Marlowe, Schiller or contemporary writers on stage, we explore -and experience the infinite possibilities of how to tell and direct stories.

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Can you say something about the plays that are being performed now that the theatres have reopened in winter? 

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The current season opened with "Der Nibelungen Wut", a world premiere by director Johanna Schall and dramaturg Grit van Dyk. This play is dedicated to the German myth of the Nibelungen and the abysses of the Furor Teutonicus, and thus also to some extent to the political right-wing desire for superiority that often invokes this myth. 

Due to the pandemic, we have initially only fixed the play schedule until the end of the year and, in accordance with the conditions, have also relied on formats in the production that adapt to the situation. For example, we have discovered the British author Tim Crouch, who places so-called minor characters from the various Shakespeare plays at the centre of a plot - three of his monologues will be premiered in autumn and illuminate our Shakespeare cosmos from their perspective.

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Is there anything else you would like to tell our readers about the Bremer Shakespeare Company? 

 

We are all very challenged in the pandemic! Rest assured that we have done everything we can to ensure that you will have by far the best evening of theatre with us!

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Renate Heitmann, thank you very much for this interview.