The Power to Shock

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III BERLIN

Onstage vomiting, with visual effects, four times, including a mass upheaval by a dozen actors at once. Excretion, with sound effects, three times. Full frontal nudity, three times, plus two lavish displays of dildoes. Onstage copulation, involving every imaginable combination of genders, countless times in seven separate works. Plus incest, transvestism, self-mutilation, murder.

That is a partial tally of deliberate affronts to the audience in 15 acclaimed stage shows from East and West Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Bochum and Schwerin. All were imported for, or staged locally to enrich, last month's Berlin Theatertreffen, the city's 27th annual festival of productions from around the German-speaking world. Although the doctrinaire Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, Germany's greatest 20th century playwright, has fallen out of fashion, his zeal to shake up bourgeois spectators still seems to inspire his artistic successors.

What makes this ferocity particularly striking is that nearly every show is mounted partly at taxpayer expense. While the U.S. has been riven for months by a controversy over federal funding for a photo show that includes nine erotic pieces, governments in East and West Germany collectively spend up to $1.5 billion a year to underwrite theaters that can be shrill, confrontational, even arguably obscene, but also aggressively intellectual, exactingly avant-garde -- and, frequently, breathtakingly good. That may be why German playgoers applaud works that would send spectators elsewhere hurtling toward the exits.

German theater is probably the most heavily subsidized in the world: government grants are seven times as large as those in France, about 25 times as large as those in Britain and roughly 100 times as large as federal grants in the U.S. As a result, nearly 200 repertory troupes spread among more than 100 cities each mount as many as 25 productions a season, often with a multitude of bit players, plus sets and costumes more elaborate than any nonmusical play receives on Broadway or even in London. Where many creative choices made in U.S. or British theater seem blatantly pragmatic, German productions give the impression that every aesthetic decision is made on the basis of art.

The chief strength of German theater is also its weakness: the primary creative figure is the director, not the writer or actor, and thus style, imagery and "concept" dominate the more human appeals of having a story and finding an emotional way to tell it. Performers are often treated like puppets. In staging Brecht's A Man's a Man for the Thalia Theater of Hamburg, director Katharina Thalbach encased the actors in masks and bodysuits so that they resembled cartoons. Playwrights, too, often find their vision subordinated to directors'. This year's Theatertreffen included two contemporary plays that were in the 1988 or 1989 festivals, on the basis that the 1990 productions were so different as to render them virtually new works.

Yet German directors can be sensitive and spellbinding. Peter Stein proves that with Roberto Zucco at the Berlin Schaubuhne, which he has made into the foremost German stage. Emotionally, this portrait of a schizophrenic murderer eerily balances between compassion and condemnation; stylistically, it blends cop-show terror with bursts of visual poetry, notably a final scene in which Zucco plummets to a ritual death like some pagan sun god. Niels-Peter Rudolph of Berlin's Schiller Theater gives a taut debut to Elizabeth II, by Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian whose works resonate with the post-World War II German politics of guilt and self-justification. The play imagines that the British Queen is on a state visit to Vienna. A wheelchair-bound plutocrat invites family and friends to watch her from his balcony, insisting that he takes no interest in the event but wishes to be a good host. The real subject is the power of social conformity: the host actually despises his guests. To his delight, in a perplexing but stunning finale, an explosion kills them all.

The best Theatertreffen shows reflect enduring virtues of the German stage: a strong political bent and a willingness to confront uncomfortable issues. Mein Kampf, a fantastic farce by George Tabori produced by East Berlin's Maxim Gorki company, envisions the young Hitler living in a basement with two old Jews. There are bursts of slapstick joy, as when one of them, razor in hand, devises the future Fuhrer's hairstyle and mustache, and bouts of horror, as in the frantic dismemberment of what is supposed to be a live chicken.

By far the best directing, however, was devoted to the worst propaganda. Johann Kresnik stages his dance narrative Ulrike Meinhof for the Bremer Theater as an apologia for the title character, a leader of the terrorist Red Army Faction. The show glides past her crimes and cruelty but lavishes half an hour on her suffering in prison, and is full of easy caricatures: bloated bourgeois householders; pop-culture crooners and TV hosts; policemen portrayed as secret sodomists. Kresnik seems to say that the real surprise about terrorism was that every right-thinking person did not join in. More disturbing than the show was the response: handfuls mocked, but multitudes cheered. Perhaps, for audiences accustomed to the vilest displays of the body onstage, the vilest displays of the mind also lose their power to shock.