Original title:
Heiner Müller after Shakespeare: Macbeth (2012)

Traslatior:
Milan Štefe

Director:
Ivica Buljan

Cast:
Marko Mandić
Milena Zupančič
Polona Vetrih
Miha Rodman
Jurij Drevenšek / Aljaž Jovanović / Gal Oblak
Jure Henigman
Jose
Stipe Kostanić / Andraž Harauer
Domen Valič/Jernej Gašperin
Anže Zevnik

Cast in the 2019/2020 season:
Marko Mandić
Milena Zupančič
Miha Rodman
Gal Oblak
Jure Henigman
Jose
Andraž Harauer
Domen Valič
Anže Zevnik

Dramaturg:
Diana Koloini

Stage designer:
son:DA

Costume designer:
Ana Savić Gecan

Composer:
Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar

Choreographer:
Tanja Zgonc

Language consultant:
Mateja Dermelj

Producer:
Robert Waltl

Co - production:
Cankarjev dom Ljubljana, Slovenia
Novo kazalište Zagreb, Croatia
ZeKaeM (Zagrebačko kazalište mladih), Zagreb, Croatia

Premiere:
30th January 2009

Duration: 120 min

Slovenian premiere of Heiner Müller's text directed by Ivica Buljan. Winner of the 2009 Borštnik Grand Prix. Performance of the Year by Cuban critics and writers and Borštnik Awards for Macbeth and Young Actor to Marko Mandić and Jure Henigman and the excellent Milena Zupančič. The 2009 Borštnik Grand Prix.

The text no longer begins with witches, supernatural forces no longer play an important role. The history of violence has no end, blood leads to new murders and each new round is even more horrible. Heiner Müller has condensed the work, the crimes follow each other and form a hellish circle faster and faster. The monologues are radically shortened, there are no more moments of reflection and no more worded thoughts.

The playwright does not hesitate to further denigrate his characters. He does not present anyone in a positive light. Even Shakespeare's good King Duncan, in the didascalia at the beginning of scene 3, sits on a pile of corpses in the shape of a throne. Macbeth is a bloody tyrant who is merely continuing the work of an earlier bloody tyrant.

Macbeth after party

Ivica Buljan

Among the Müllerian variations of Shakespeare's texts there is one really special – Macbeth – which gives evidence of the brutal art of translation-adaptation and remains registered in the annals of the East Germany theatre reviews. In the beginning of the seventies, soon after this text had been written it stirred up most turbulent polemics. In the magazine Sinn und Form, the philosopher Wolfgang Harich attacked Müller for the pessimism he used to transform this Shakespeare's tragedy linking it to the wave of violence and pornography that satiated the art in West Germany of that period. Martin Linzer and Friedrich Dieckmann wrote to defend Müller; in their opinion the issue was not about an adaptation or a translation yet about an original text. Müller's Macbeth has been wilfully bereaved of its optimistic perspective and every teleological dimension. In his commentary from 1972, Müller himself gave an explanation: from the very first scene (where the witches appear) he felt the need for a modification of the text; he wanted to suppress the metaphysical substrate and especially the idea of »predestination«. His text does not start with the witches; the supernatural forces play no more an important role. The history of violence has no end; blood leads to new murders and each circle becomes even more horrible. Heiner Müller has condensed the work; crimes follow one another creating a hell circle with increasing speed. The monologues are radically shortened; there are no more moments of reflection and scruples put in words. Shakespeare’s Macbeth decides to kill Macduff’s family to hush down the rumours; and his Müllerian relative has already got used to acts of killing. The playwright shows no hesitation in making his heroes even darker. He presents no one in a positive light. In the instructions at the beginning of the third scene, even the good Shakespeare’s King Duncan is sitting on a heap of corpses arranged in the shape of a throne. Macbeth is a bloody tyrant merely continuing the work of some other, precedent bloody tyrant.

This theatre of cruelty is amplified by the subversion of seriousness and the »decomposition of heroes«. Müller gives Macbeth a sociological dimension; he draws attention to peasants and soldiers set as opposite to the aristocratic elite. Numerous stage instructions reflect the suffering that people have to endure under the pressure of the nobility. The piece offers no utopian belief in a revolution that might change the world. In the ninth scene, Macduff nails the doorman to the door with a stroke of a sword for having not opened the door soon enough; later he cuts the tongue to a servant because he chooses not to like his answer. The language of »the great« knows no nobility. In the first scene, Müller changes Duncan's grandiose formulation about Macbeth – overfilled with honour titles – into a simple »good Macbeth«. The heroes have no psychological depth; they are turned into ridiculous and have become marionettes of the bloody Grand Guignole. They are victims of the power which they enjoy and which has turned them into stone. When Müller staged Macbeth with Ginko Čolakov at the Volksbühne in 1982, he insisted in preserving the comical and trivial parts which allow the possibility of keeping the distance with the horrors of an absolute power: »There is something liberating in the triviality. We are not exposed to the actual horror but rather directed into thinking about it. My intention is to achieve that goal.«   

On basis of Shakespeare's groundwork the East-German playwright ponders about violence in history presenting it as an unceasing catastrophe. In his essay Shakespeare, Difference from 1982, he accentuates the return of the mythic. Also in Macbeth he combines different times confronting the play with the 11th century Scotland, or the modern vocabulary, which he never wanted to evade in his drama. After Jan Kott –in East Germany he was published in 1965 and had great influence on Müller – Shakespeare's characters seem to be mushrooms absorbing our time at this very moment.

It is possible to read Macbeth also as a satire of the present time, although the author himself rejects such analogies. So, he reproached the director Hans Hollmann who directed the piece in 1974 for depending too much on actual events and fashion – especially for interlacing the story about the killings of communists in Iran, or the story about the American war in Vietnam – yet without shaping aesthetic solutions on how to present violence. Nevertheless, the reviews highlighted the parallel between the special constellation of his translation: the opposition between the elite in power and the sea of peasants having no rights at all. The situation in the Soviet Union after the outburst of the Revolution became an obsessive topic for Müller in the period Macbeth was being created. It was the period after Mauser and Cement – both pieces dealing with research on the formation of the USSR. Macbeth actually represents a sample piece, a prototype serving as an example for the plays he wrote later. The author does not write about Stalin or about the United States; he gives no points to this or that political system, but he rather brings light upon the structure: he is puts into force some kind of an archaeological research on an absolute power and its logical analysis. 

At first sight, Macbeth does not belong to the same opus asHamlet Machine or Medea Material, it represents however a brilliant example of a Müllerian reading between the lines.

Svetlana Slapšak

DJ Macbeth

In a posthumous interview published in The American Theater in 2001, Heiner Müller declared that he hated Shakespeare, that he had "eaten him", condensed him like specialists in reducing human heads, cannibalised him. It is hard to imagine a more honest statement from a playwright. The hatred is most pertinent to Hamlet, and is most evident in Hamlet the Machine. However, a few years earlier, the hatred may have been a little smaller, and the appetite was provoked by other plots than Shakespeare's; it was Macbeth, Müller's 1971-2 reading and rewriting of Shakespeare. This dance macabre was danced in those years in different places and to different music: Milais, Palestinian, Black September, Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head, an unknown Vietcong man was shot in the head, planes were hijacked, trains exploded, capitalism took revenge for the student revolt, socialism too. In Munich in 1976, at minus 10 °C, I had to walk to libraries and seminars every day because it was not advisable to take the underground, and a member of the Oetker family was kidnapped. On the way from the train station to the Christmas market, the police usually searched pedestrians six times. Müller's Macbeth committed every one of these crimes, he is the main DJ of the dance macabre between 1968 and 1977, when the "German Autumn" comes to a bloody end with the Mogadishu action (Lufthansa Flight 181) and the suicides of the RAF leaders in Stammheim prison.

With pictures of these events solemnly spread across the world's media - even in colour - was it possible at the time to write anything other than Müller's Macbeth? This is not a pathetic question, because it is followed by a whole series of complex answers: Firstly, Shakespeare was a metaphorical formula for translating anything into East German culture, where even for Vietnam you couldn't be quite sure how the Party would feel about it two days later; secondly, the acte gratuit, as a poetic unmotivation of crime, which could appear in the hopelessness and surprise of mutilation and massacre after the First World War, no longer made sense after the Second World War, because it had been replaced by the banality of bureaucratised genocide; thirdly, the genius of the playwright foresaw a future in which the fusion of acte gratuit and bureaucratised genocide would give rise to a poetics of violence between Big Brother, football/hockey fans and media lynchings, from which one can deduce the stupidest and most superficial discourse of war to date. Only in the future, say today, would the character of Macbeth, with his absent motivation, be fully functional. He would be constantly mixing house, funk, punk and tank, lame explanations of governments and politicians invading the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza or whatever. A year or so ago, the incomprehensible verbal ruminations of small cultures, say Balkan ones, about heavenly nations, the luck of losing peace and winning wars, ancestors calling for killing from the grave, or even more extreme short-cuts like the explanations of both sides after 9/11 and the like, would have been excluded from the mix. And, lo and behold, pop culture now covers it all: Hollywood films such as The Kingdom of Heaven and 300, given the choice between the stupid and the crazy, appeal to a population that can appreciate the crazy. While The Kingdom of Heaven, after the motivation for madness has been carefully explained, still preaches a politically correct solution, in 300 the aesthetics of senseless violence and thanatophilia have expanded globally from their initial small socio-cultural-stripe niche of Lederhosen gays; the common enemy today is of course dark-skinned, with lots of piercings, and of Afro-Asian descent. It's not worth much if, in the safety of your own home, you laugh uproariously at the rhinoceroses in armour (with piercings) storming the Thermopylae crossing: you might be lynched in the cinema, but at home, in the next room, sits your offspring, whose time is torn between playing 300 with bloodstains (a hit!) and checking Facebook.

DJ Macbeth would be in full employment today and no one would question his motivation, because it is absolutely clear: power in any form. That is why Müller's Macbeth is a bit anachronistic today: he is still explaining to himself how evil he is. The second sign of anachronisticism is rhetorical reductionism, which undoubtedly functions as a symptom of Müller's cannibalism over Shakespeare: the dominant stylistic trick of Müller's Macbeth is the litote. The result is that Müller's character is not yet sufficiently " tamed", and that is precisely why he is still sufficiently stagey. What sense does this reading make of Macbeth's 'problem', or the necessarily preserved Shakespearean dramatic knot in which Macbeth shows signs of the traumatiser's post-traumatic shock? Tartuffe's shadow passes across the stage in place of the ghost of the last murder victim: Macbeth lies.

Let's take the mask of the critic and the essayist: the lie, hélas, is the only truth today. Today, it is the only truth. Truth is the only truth today. How far away is the time, hélas, when a common scandal could have happened in France and Greece because a para-fascist group called itself Hellas and cannibalised the sacred name of the cradle of European culture! The fact that Macbeth is lying today is a sign/pointer for reading Müller. May I be allowed to find the door that Müller was also constantly looking for and behind which he found his dramatic invention, which was always alien, cannibalised, condensed. The figure of this place was Müller's Berlin everyday, the door leading to the vital libraries of the Hellenistic cities in the Pergamon Museum. The door doesn't open and doesn't lead anywhere: the museum's audience is seduced to admire the architecture of the marketplace, the collective memory of parsley and fig trees. You will never find a museum visitor gazing admiringly at the side door of the marketplace that once, in ancient Pergamon or Miletus, led to a world of knowledge and enjoyment. At least I did not. Mark Antony, however, gave Cleopatra 200 000 scrolls from the Pergamon library as a wedding present. Small consolation, since her mother's library, the Alexandrian, had been destroyed in street riots during her previous love affair - but moving evidence of a culturally inscribed love. Prove you love me, give me 200,000 books.

Whatever Müller ever wrote was read and then "eaten" and reduced. For Müller, the shame of the "new", "topical" subject was the shame of the lie, of the truth/only one/today in whatever semantic combination. Everything that is being written must be written. What is happening can and should only be "eaten" if it is processed and classified according to existing cultural forms. The obsessive images of violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the world had truly become a global village, could only be seen through the ancient playwrights or Shakespeare, through their rhetoric or their guts, depending on their poetic inclinations. This cultural censorship, which requires above all a responsible handling of the notion of so-called truth, is as much an ethnogenic as an aesthetogenic one. In Müller's case, the ethical impulse is deeply inscribed in the norms of the constant evasion, deception and cultural coding of artistic creation under a totalitarian regime, the constant proof of the integrity of a folkloric character, the trickster. Betrayal and deception, even when conceptualised as necessary measures of returning to the primitive (real, immanent) foundations of the original socialist ideas, must not be associated with "truth". The aesthetic impulse subordinates itself to the ethical, lest decoration and enjoyment undermine its power: aestheticization, as one of the convenient outlets in socialist forms of intellectual commodity, is only recognizable in late Honeckerian culture, and in Yugoslav culture it has been dominant in the majority of the cultural-artistic population since the mid-1960s. From this perspective, Heiner Müller approaches the figure of a cultural saint, someone who has managed to balance socialist convictions, critical integrity, respect for cultures and a visceral instinct to read and write.

Such a reading of Macbeth makes the dramatic structure of an intimately and ideologically chewed Shakespeare logical and convincing: Macbeth can only be a grim, dull, obsessive, hypocritical character who cuts living human flesh in order to then talk about its rotting. His self-love is disgusting, just as his rise to power was unimaginative and his passion, including his sexual passion, impotent. His verbalisation of disgust is superficial, his self-invention as a criminal cheap: Eichmann's banality looks heroic compared to this trivial lover of horror - not to mention Richard III. He is even deprived of the occasional glimmer of black humour that Shakespeare, who adored the adulation of his audience, had to give him. His crimes take place on two socio-cultural levels: he kills noblemen who are in the way of his career, and he kills peasants and soldiers, just like that. While for the former he spouts pathetic rhetorical platitudes, for the latter he spends only a dull cynicism, suitable for an incomparably smaller personal risk. Skeletons with a little or a bit more flesh, severed tongues, severed penises, heads, arms, legs, whole bodies fly across the stage, blood drips from hands, knives, spears, boots, is waded on, is skidded on: the monotony of the bodies' behaviour is akin to a livestock breeder's, and Macbeth has the real power of a DJ, suspiciously and briefly, until the early hours of the morning. Lady Macbeth, who might otherwise have crushed her baby's head, dies without our knowing how or why. Macbeth accompanies her death with a cold constellation. There is no sexual chemistry between the two criminals, the pheromones have been replaced by a verbal rant about horrors, like a scout camp night. The witches, who should arouse admiration or frighten someone, act as stage objects: in another context, Macbeth would have got the message hidden in a TV commercial or a Bible, as is usually the case among the freaks who then go and kill half their school. Macbeth is so grey and so devoid of inner fire that he doesn't even need to construct a narrative about his unrewarded abilities, his criminal genius, his frustrations, his nothing: Macbeth is simply a brute and not a tragic one.

Müller also needed this complete demotivation of the character in order to destroy any possible associative reception: the unmotivated is a figure of deideologisation. No goal that justifies violence can be convincing or acceptable. Paradoxically, his "programme" is very similar to that of Rudi Dutschke, who, instead of the violence and radicalism of the Red Fraction, proposed a "march through the institutions": since this was incomparably more dangerous, he paid the blood tax immediately. In both Müller's and Dutschke's cases, it is a slow process of reading and acquiring knowledge before action, radicalism replaces respect for what exists, especially if it is still unread, violence is forbidden before or after any reflection on violence, which can only be trivial. Müller is dramatis auctor, Dutschke dramatis persona, but not in the same drama. Positive characters have nothing to say about culture and history. Negative ones do, so the question "why" remains unanswered.

It is easy to imagine such a Macbeth (in theatrical form) in Parliament, in a shopping mall, in an airport, in the lobby of a bank, in the boardroom of a large corporation - and, of course, in the huge ballroom of a disco club, that is, anywhere where the removal of a single plug from the wall can change the entire power structure. I can only see the Middle Ages and Scotland in amusement park versions. Places where blood is constantly being spilled, no way, because the power issue is not being resolved there. I cannot see Lady Macbeth, who has inspired many a misogynist fantasy, any other way than as the wife of the late Slobodan Milošević, Miro Marković: counting the money from squatting, giving a warrant for the murder of a political opponent, a former family friend (twice, it seems), writing nonsense, weaving a plastic flower into her hair. This would have been the ideal partner for Müller's Macbeth, on the same level of debauchery and ruthlessness. Alas, incomparably greater and more important than what the author wanted to give her. However, this is a local (my) on-call obsession that is as illegitimate as any other. For it is clear to me that any production in this case must betray the author's dramatic poetics and the strict rules of reading/writing that he has set. Reading aloud? Reading within oneself? Reading in a theatre auditorium, so that to a randomly chosen voice from the audience, the actors act out what is read, while everyone sits with the text in their laps, hunting for attention to a few possible agreed commands? An eternal ordeal?

Müller wrote programmatically only what he had read, i.e. what had already been written. As a director, he allowed himself much more freedom, but when a playwright eats Shakespeare, the director is left with relatively little. In this case, skeletons and bones, and that's without jumping into a freshly dug grave, without Yorick's skull, without randomly poking rats behind the curtain ... It's all simple and obvious, a kind of animal macbethism from the best days of the Discovery Channel: rhino on rhino, no piercings. The audience has no alternative but to take full responsibility for the seriousness and horror of the violence. The director could have asked the audience to become zombies, so as not to overlook a single aspect of DJ Macbeth's dance macabre. In this case, a little care should be taken in the wardrobe, lest some of them remain so.

From the critiques

“What’s most fascinating about this staging (and, I have to say, because it was in Slovenian, I have no idea of the extent to which Müller “adapted” Shakespeare’s actual lines) is the way in which, just as Müller de-Shakespeared Shakespeare, Buljan re-Shakespeares Müller. Or at least, the text is played the least like any staging of Heiner Müller I have ever seen, and at the same time makes a pretty recognisable Macbeth. Of course, part of this comes from the fact that the text is no longer in German. Even when translated into English, Müller’s poetry retains a certain chilly rigidity. Rendered into Slovenian, it gains a violence and heat that I’ve never heard in his work before. As with Damned Be The Traitor of His Homeland (also Slovenians directed by a Croatian, interestingly) you notice the capacity for the Slovenian language to sustain violent outbursts, or prolonged shouting, in ways that English (or Portuguese, I’d say) simply doesn’t. Added to this is – again, particularly noticeable in the wake of Damned... – the enviable physicality of the performers.” Postcard from the Gods, Andrew Haydon, critic of The Guardian

“Buljan's  aestetuics with the predominantly local cast really takes off … The piece is played in-the-round, a format which I pretty much detest. Here, “the round” is made up of white plastic beach/garden chairs, forming a relatively small square stage in the middle of Incrível de Almadense’s much larger auditorium (one which, ordinarily, would be dominated by the large pros. arch stage that I’ve got my back to). The two tiers of balconies and the stage are all made use of, raced round, stamped on, climbed up and sung from, but the real meat of the relentless, kinetic action takes place on the floor right in front of us – “off-stage” for the cast are several front row chairs with “reserved” signs sellotaped to them; they even do their costume changes sat there. And I loved it.” Postcard from the Gods, Andrew Haydon, critic of The Guardian

 “With modest production elements and a talented cast, Buljan has created a lean, brutal interpretation of Müller’s play. The simple set, powerful, saturated lights, and spare but evocative costume design create a visceral experience of the disposability and devaluation of human life. Emblematic of this savvy design is the monarch’s crown, constructed on the body of each actor out of brown packaging tape. This choice sharply mocks the institution of the monarchy and the power that goes with it. At its root, the crown and the king are just as disposable and easily consumed as the feast that the cast and audience devour and scatter across the stage at Macbeth’s coronation.” Breaking down the bard (Slavic and European Performance, Vol. 32, no. 1; Spring 2012/Winter 2013)

“Macbeth relies on the male energy of young actors supported with experience of two actresses. It unleashes them into the gladiator arena where a fight for life or death is taking place.’’the jury of the 44th Maribor Theatre Festival

‘’Soldiers bravely enter the scene while ecstatically and with great skill stay in character. Their scenes of lust don’t appear sacrilegious but deeply aesthetically united. So much so the illusion of reality vanishes. The minimalistic costumes designed by Ana Savić Gecan and thrilling music by Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar leave an even more powerful mark on the audience.’’  Nenad Obradović, www.e-novine.com

Awards

The Grand Prix for the Best Performance of the Maribor Theatre Festival, 44th Maribor Theatre Festival, Maribor, Slovenia; 2011

Borštnik Award for acting to Marko Mandić for the role of Macbeth, 44th Maribor Theatre Festival, Maribor, Slovenia; 2011

Borštnik Award for Young Actor to Jure Henigman, 44th Maribor Theatre Festival, Maribor, Slovenia; 2011

Premio Villanueva de la crítica cubana Award from Cuban critics and writers for best foreign performance shown in Cuba in 2009, Havana, Cuba; 2009

Festivals and tours

44th Maribor Theatre Festival, Maribor, Slovenia; 2009

International Theatre Festival Havana, Cuba; 2009

ZeKaeM Zagreb, Croatia; 2009

Theatre Olympics in Seoul, South Korea; 2011

La MaMa Theatre, New York, USA; 2011

CZKD Beograd, Serbia; 2012

31st Almada Festival, Portugal; 2014

Heiner Müller

Born 09.01.1929 in Eppendorf (Saxony)

Secondary School; "State Labour Service" // 1945 High-School graduation // district administration employee in Waren / Mecklenburg // library employee // journalistic engagements

1954-55 research assistant at the Writers’ Association // "Junge Kunst” art magazine editor

1957 author and dramaturge

1958-59 employed at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin

1959 winner of the Heinrich Mann Prize (together with Inge Mueller)

1961 after the first presentation of his work “Die Umsiedlerin” the play was banned and the author was ejected from the Writers’ Association from

1970 dramaturge at the Berliner Ensemble

1976 switches from the Berliner Ensemble to the “Volksbühne”, Berlin

1979 winner of the Mülheimer Drama Prize for “Germania Tod in Berlin” (production of the Münchner Kammerspiele) from

1983 member of the Akademie der Künste in the GDR

1985 winner of the Georg-Büchner Prize

1990 winner of the Kleist Prize //1991 winner of the European Theatre Prize

1990-1993 last president of the Akademie der Künste

1992 directing member of the Berliner Ensembles

1995 sole artistic director

Died 30.12.1995 in Berlin