International Theatre Conference: Directing and Authorship in Western Drama

Panel Five
Saturday October 25th, 9-10:30am

Laure de Verdalle, Ecole Normale, Paris
The German Dramatist, an intermediary between the play and the director.

It is not a profession in which we can be in the foreground: that is the place of the director and of the comedians, and one has to accept it. The one who wants to come true, has to become a director, or to write plays, or anything similar. But dramatist is a work in which we put ourselves in the service of others.
( Dramatist, man, born in 1943, municipal theatre, city of 50 000 inhabitants).

Dramatists' presence in theatres is a German specificity. Indeed, since Lessing, the dramatist is, for the German theatre, a critic accompanying the production, a literary councillor, a co-worker of the director. His work "takes place below and beyond the performance", "in the confluence of the writing, the direction and the criticism" (Dort, 1995). Starting from this common history, the separation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) led, during forty years, to the evolution of theatrical structures and of the profession of dramatist in different directions. The reunification confronted brutally the representations and contents of dramaturgic activity that had developed in each State.

In GDR, under the influence of Brecht's theories, the dramatist was a pivot in theatres, being both the ideological consciousness of the working collective and a director's long-term partner. He played a central role in the interpretation of plays and the elaboration of repertory. Inside the theatrical organization, he was the spokesman of the written text and of his author. He had a scientific function in an artistic universe, a function of translation in the sense this term was used by the sociology of sciences (Callon, 1986). The dramatist's work of mediation was therefore extremely valued by the theatre organization in GDR.

Since the reunification, the reorganization of theatres around projects, as well as the increasing use of invited directors, modify the contents of dramaturgic activities. The dramatists see their activity's borders move quickly. They are at the same time confronted with a picture of the West German dramatist that they did not understand. These alterations raise many questions (Becker, 1988). How do the dramatists take position today in theatres which organizational and aesthetic identity has been compromised? The reunification, by destabilizing the East German theatrical structures, confronts the dramatists with a modification of their professional environment. It forced them to redefine their activities of mediation around new contents, while valuing elements which are an inheritance of the theatrical system of ex-GDR.

This proposition leans on a field work led between 1999 and 2000 in four public theatres of ex-GDR. For each of these theatres, I exploited statistics published for the period 1989-2000 (attendance rate, number of employees, stage settings and representations counts). I led a monographic work which aimed at tracking down the organizational changes inferred by the transition (studying work divisions between director and dramatist). I also drove biographic interviews with dramatists in charge in these various theatres, on the condition that they began their theatrical activity in ex-GDR. These interviews dealt with their careers, their working practices in ex-GDR and in reunified Germany, their representations of dramaturgic activity. They supply a qualitative material which helps to understand the professional activity and its transformations since the reunification.