Sharpened Perspective

It all began early in the morning. At 8:00 h, the group met in the seminar centre of the “Rost- und Silberlaube”, a bright room with large glass windows on the campus of Freie Universität Berlin, for a four-hour workshop on performance analysis — a format that deliberately takes place outside any pressure of grading. For four hours, the discussion focused on the students’ previous theatre experiences: the musicals they had seen and what occupies their minds when they attend a performance. Uncomfortable questions were addressed too: that theatre can be demanding, that it presents high barriers, and that at times one can feel out of place there.

The conversation then turned to the production itself: to Thomas Melle and the phenomenon he prefers to call manic-depressive rather than bipolar, and to the question of how a novel written in such personal terms can be translated into stage action. The topic was not entirely unfamiliar to anyone in the group: some knew similar experiences from their own lives, and one student spoke, for instance, about her father, a doctor, who talks about it at home. Finally, the group collected words such as “atmosphere”, “emotion”, “social pressure”, “the unexpected” and “the audience’s reaction”, terms that capture what sparked their interest. Each student then took one of them with them into the performance.

Immediately before the performance, there was a warm welcome: on the lawn beneath the trees outside the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Nora Hertlein-Hull, the festival director of Theatertreffen, received the group, introduced the festival and spoke with the students about the production.

What the students saw next left hardly anyone unmoved: Paulina Alpen as the writing alter-ego in a red “body armour”, surrounded by six doppelgängers acting as a physical choir. A total work of art combining sound, make-up and choreography – a “rollercoaster of emotions”, as the jury called it.

A few days later, the group came together again, this time in Room 105 of the Rheingau-Gymnasium, to compare their impressions. Consensus was quickly reached: it had been a special, elaborately staged evening. Above all, the acoustic layer had made an impression – the sound design became physically perceptible, at times threatening, with deep basses shaking the body to the core. The language also preoccupied the students: at the beginning, some had been worried about whether they would be able to follow the evening. However, they quickly found a way in.

But the most intense discussion was about a distinction that was important to the students: the production does not intend to create the impression that, after visiting the theatre, one knows what it feels like to live with manic depression. On the contrary – it makes it palpable that such an experience cannot simply be emulated. And precisely therein lies its power: it does not primarily aim at empathy, but opens up a different form of understanding – the understanding of an experience that eludes direct empathy.