ABSTRACT
Thomas Ostermeier’s Nora ended with a bang that challenged the usual renditions of Ibsen’s classic, and it was not the bang of the infamous door.2 In the finale of his 2002 production, Nora shot her husband. Not once, but she fired a whole magazine into his body, which, soaked in blood, collapsed into the gigantic fish tank at the centre of Jan Pappelbaum’s splendid set. On a revolving stage, he had created a sleek open-plan living space that situated the 1879 play within a twenty-first-century environment straight out of a designer magazine – a visual signature that has become emblematic for this collaboration of designer and director. Ibsen’s text was equally translated into contemporary, conversational German. Torvald Helmer handled his laptop computer and his mobile phone, taking pictures of his trophy children when he wasn’t actually making a call, while Nora dressed for the Christmas party in a Lara Croft outfit, and sickly Dr Rank turned into an HIV patient. Ostermeier’s
reinvention of the ultimate bourgeois drama was as celebrated as it was controversial, yet became his biggest success to date and put the director’s name on the international map. The production has seen some 300 performances since its premiere in 2002, many of them abroad, including in New York, where it came in for hefty criticism
from Village Voice critic Michael Feingold. Protesting that Ibsen’s heroine was ‘the kind of person unlikely to commit such violence’, he missed her ‘spiritual transcendence’ and eventually decided to kill off the director, condemning his production as ‘dumb’, ‘idiotic’ and ‘the kind of German theater that has to wallow in self-indulgence to prove to itself that it’s alive’ (Feingold 2004). Scrutinising Ostermeier’s work as director as well as artistic director over the past decade, I will attempt to demonstrate quite the opposite: that his work perceptively reflects the trajectory of German society into the new millennium, as an energetic, youthful ‘Generation Golf ’ turned into a crisis-ridden, stagnant ‘Generation Angst’.3 A self-declared cultural materialist, Ostermeier has a distinctive neo-realist approach to directing, fuelled by an explicitly political attitude. Abhorring the term ‘political theatre’ to describe his work, he nevertheless aims to make his theatre alive by capturing some of the more inconvenient truths of real life and society in present-day Germany.
