At German theatres, some assistant directors are employed for the duration of a production, from first rehearsals to opening night, or until the last performance. In any one season, such assistant directors would move from theatre to theatre. Other assistant directors are employed by the theatre on a longer-term contract. Contracts for two consecutive seasons often include the bonus of being given directorial responsibility for what will often be that person’s first professional theatre production as a director. Such was the case for Rahel Hofbauer. Born in Graz, Austria, in 1999, she worked as an assistant director since 2019, at Deutsches Theater Berlin, and Theater Chur (Switzerland), completed her studies of German in 2022, and was on a two-year contract with Theater Bremen as resident assistant director from 2021-2023. At the end of her tenure, she gave her directorial debut at Theater Bremen with a production of Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). The play is known as a major representative of the German enlightenment, a stalwart part of the German canon of theatre and literature. Several high-end conventional productions of the play, with the respective elites of German theatre (in terms of acting, direction and design) at the times of production, were filmed for TV and are available on YouTube.
The Bremen production, first seen in 2023, has been revived annually since, because in the federal state of Bremen, Emilia Galotti constitutes one of the two plays by Lessing (the other one being Miss Sara Sampson) that is compulsory reading for the Abitur examinations in the subject of German, for the years 2024, 2025 and 2026. It is considered, in the guidelines published by the state’s education authorities, as representative of the path of the individual towards freedom.
In the performance I saw, therefore, about 95% of the audience were school students currently studying the play. They had obviously dressed up for the occasion, and there was an overall mixed fragrance of deodorants and perfumes in the air, much more so than for an older audience demographic. As soon as the lights went down, however, the giggling and excited whispering started – such an audience can be quite a challenge for any theatre company. In Bremen, the production addressed such a potential lack of attention right from the start, and very efficiently and successfully. The audience were seated on a ramp of rows facing the level floor stage area, with bare theatre walls, without curtains, to the left, right. The back wall, and the floor were covered from very close to the front row of spectators to the back wall with a single large sheet of white transparent gauze fabric. The actors emerged from behind the ramp at the left and right wall of the stage space, dressed in contemporary casual clothes, with shorts and T-shirts, and walked towards the back wall in straight lines, body facing the direction in which they walked, but heads turned to face the rows of spectators.
They looked at us, straight in the faces, straight into the eyes, for the duration of their very slow and deliberate walk, emerging closer to us and moving away from us to the back wall. As their physical distance increased, so did the intensity of their stare. They came across as serious, focused, full of purpose, determined, and full of natural authority. They drew our attention, and while we were aware they were watching us intently, they made us watch them with just as much attention. We felt their presence; it was initially something unusual and unexpected. As it continued, and as it increased in intensity, there was a phase of unease. However, we also realised that they constituted no threat, that they were benevolent in their seriousness and in their attention to us. Yes, they were inviting us into their world.
Halfway through their walk to the back wall, some of the actors took turns to present a very concise plot summary. As there was no set apart from the gauze on the floor, they also verbally announced the beginning of the First Act with its setting. Once all five actors had reached the opposite end of the stage space, near the back wall, they lifted the gauze where they stood, and moved to different places on the stage floor, all under the gauze. Visually, this was impressive, while I certainly considered the potentially restrictive environment for the actors, who must have engaged in exercises to avoid claustrophobia. Certainly, their movements under the gauze, especially when they withdrew from it to return to the free space of the stage area without gauze, were very deliberate and looked almost choreographed, so as to avoid getting completely and unwillingly entangled in the gauze. In terms of the production’s take on the play, each character’s restrictions within the given set of ideas about their position in society and life became clear through text – chiefly among them: the prince, the man of power, in love with the colonel’s daughter; the colonel, replete with the ideas of appropriate behaviour and personal honour; the prince’s servant, scheming to the extent of murder for his master. Strikingly, they were all caught under the same gauze, which made them almost unrecognizable as individuals.
At some point in the production, when all had re-emerged at the back wall of the stage space from underneath the gauze, the gauze disappeared and instead a set of ropes came down from the fly tower in a snap, and the performers spent some time fastening metal hooks at the ends of the ropes to corresponding eyelets on the floor. Once completed, the floor was lifted from the front, as if there had been a hinge at the back, revealing a grid of wooden beams underneath, opening to the storage area below. For the scenes in this environment, the actors were on the sides of that lifted floor area.
In approaching the production, Hofbauer and her dramaturg, Elif Zengin, realised that the title character is given very little to say in the play. In their version of the play, as the basis of their production, they deleted the character of Emilia Galotti completely, and left pauses in the production where her lines would have been. Throughout the evening, material from other texts was used, gently interwoven with Lessing’s text and mainly spoken by the actors. Only at the end a long passage from a text by Elfriede Jelinek was narrated in the form of a recording.
The audience had settled during those long initial minutes of being stared at and settled into attentive silence; the production was able to hold that attention for its entire duration of 70 minutes without interval. Hofbauer’s intriguing, imaginative and consistent production was praised by at least one of the critics cited in the annual survey of the season’s highlights by Theater Heute.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
