Dagsavisen 02.06.2007

THEATRE
«Die Massnahme»
By Bertolt Brecht & Hanns Eisler
Direction: Tore Vagn Lid
Transiteateret/BIT-Teatergarasjen
Bergen International Festival

At a seminar on contemporary drama last year Tore Vagn Lid of Transiteatret said that discussions about the dramatic text overshadow a much more central question: What is an important theatre experience? Transiteatret looks at the theatre room as a critical room for experience, or in the director’s own words: “a kind of social testing zone, with an open window towards thoughts and working forms traditionally foreign to the theatre.”

This year’s co-production with the Bergen International Festival where Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s “Die Massnahme” is staged at BIT-teatergarasjen, is on that score a respectable, good and well prepared room experiment. In the middle of the performance this critic panicked because she has lost the brown envelope which everybody was given at the entrance. The envelope contained a small music score and a letter where a reading audience is asked to enter into the play’s well-known approach to the problem: Four recently returned agitators have during a successful mission shot one of their comrades. It is up to the chorus to judge.
The panic arose because my neighbour has an extra name ticket in his envelope. Were these tickets supposed to be used? Should one at a certain moment be asked to stand up in the same way as one has seen parts of the audience stand up to sing? What will happen to the one who has lost his envelope?
Those who know Brecht and Eisler know that the point was to prevent the audience from being entranced by the art experience. The ideal was that the audience was reclining, regarding it all in a critical way. And the learning plays were not first and foremost written to educate the audience, but to educate the stage actors themselves. The production of Transiteatret opens to a new way of raising questions about the relation between a detached observation and a committed participation by dissolving the divide between stage and audience. In addition various forms of communicative presence are tried out using real-time video projection and older sound and image recordings.  The experience is that every spectator is a potential participant. This experience has its place outside the theatre room, too.                                                                                                                                                                                           

Written by Grethe Melby

Published in Dagsavisen, Oslo, 02.06.07