What is it like to be author in a time distressed by wars and crises?

Katja Brunner It’s great! Finally, there’s work to do. No, that was a bad joke. I think that we as writers and /or theatre makers are increasingly and more vehemently called upon to cut paths for complexity – while taking a strong stance all the same. This is how I see it: Complexity is the net, and as long as it is a good safety net, you can turn the wildest tricks and capers above it. But that is a high aspiration.

Putting it more mildly, one might say: Arrangements of interpretation surrounding neuralgic points, which is what my work of a writer comes down to. Adopting and exchanging points of view, finding verbal imagery, making offers that we will be facing. And as a private individual, I find it helpful to look at history – as in: great moments for humankind – to make sure I don’t get too pessimistic. But we shouldn’t get hide ourselves away in regarding the past. I think that we should take everything that democracy gives us 100 times more seriously, I really do. I think we’re too blindly stuck in the things that we take for granted and aren’t defending their basic requirements enough.

Why do you write for theatre?

The theatre as a reflectorium is of major importance to me; it calls, plays and spews back what we are doing over the course of the days – it has the monumental task of dissecting what happens, what moods and swamps we’re wading through – and to form something from this slush that might give light or throw shadow. It is a collective stronghold of transformation and as such, I think it is indispensable.

Specifically: It can unite us and activate us, it gives us embodiments (both actual and metaphorical), it lets us recognise things that have been constructed. AND to show language as clay, formed by gestures of power, and perhaps to alienate it again, to turn it back into our own language – perhaps by taking a detour via a kind of artificiality, that it what I’d like to achieve. Of course it’s all allowed to be fun, too – showing that all our agreements are fiction, the subject of a continual negotiation, that there is beauty in this and a fragility, something worth protecting called – perhaps – freedom.

The Taming of the Shrew is a misogynist play that celebrates women’s domestication by a patriarchal, heteronormative value system. Seen from a canon-critical point of view, the play would hardly find many enthusiastic champions today. How does this align with you as an author with a feminist perspective?

Oh well, read through our contemporary eyes, it could be seen as a pastiche of male egos gone wild, of gentlemanly behaviour and entitlement mentality – a satirising textbook of everything that defines toxic masculinity.

In my version, I relate it to various elements that may initially appear to be alien to the play. My rewriting is based on the assumption that because such portrayals of women have been strongly informing our humour seamlessly all the way to the present times – denigrating exchanges between women as drivel, pathologising women who speak their minds as shrews etc. – that these narratives, no matter how humorous they may be, are the logical consequence of the fact that there are men who kill women.

So I combine this misogynist humour of Shakespeare’s with the reality of femicides, the most severe form of patriarchal violence. Or at least the most permanent one. Otherwise, it’s about clouds, forgiveness, sisterly love, grand gestures and water. Hydrotherapy. 

With regards to gender-critical rewritings at theatres, arts journalist Christiane Wahl has observed a predominantly ironic devaluation of male characters as dorks or creeps, which would respond to gender stereotyping with nothing but a new kind of stereotyping of genders. What are your observations?

I understand, and I’ve also seen this trend that sometimes annoys me for a moment – and then I think: so what. This kind of ham-fisted caricaturing was basically the preferred m.o. throughout 2000 years of theatre history: the femme fatale, the femme fragile, the virago etc. So I’m allowed to not be entirely complex in my claims about masculinity. If this is a deliberate attitude, I find it legitimate in a way, in a sort of “genre of lightweight revenge”.

Maybe we need a few years of exhibiting “male” dorks until we can get somewhere else. I would love post-gender all-inclusive and for everyone but we won’t get there until we reach a post-patriarchal era, and the signs that I’m seeing are semi-promising in that regard. Maybe these dork-characters show us how very, very androcentric our views are: When we aren’t given insights into the “male” psyche, it seems to be a great deal more unfair.

And in general, I do feel that we might all become a bit more visionary when it comes to new codes of behaviour.

This is the third time that you are working with director Pınar Karabulut. Where is the connection in your creative work?

My recommendation: Watch the show, then you’ll see what it is. Having said that, she is simply a powerful director who doesn’t deal in pleasantries. There is a heft to her work, a confrontational strength that is cleverly directional and I like that.

The interview was conducted by Daniel Richter.