Jiemian News Reporter | Lin Ziren Jiemian News Editor | Jiang Yan When the host asked who among the audience had watched the puppet show "Brecht's Ghosts" by the Berlin Theater Company last year, more than half of the audience raised their hands. Director Suther Suse Wächter smil

Interface News Reporter | Lin Ziren

Interface News Editor | Jiang Yan

When the host asked who among the audience had watched the puppet show "Brecht's Ghosts" by the Berlin Theater Company last year, more than half of the audience raised their hands, and the director Suse Wächter saw this and smiled. This is the scene that appeared at a meeting held by the drama in Shanghai a few days ago. "Brecht's Ghosts" completed its Asian premiere at the Young Theater in 2023 and received a high score of 9.0 on Douban. This is also the Berlin Theater Company's first appearance in Shanghai since its establishment 74 years ago.

"Brecht's Ghosts" director Suther Weisit at the sharing session (Photo source: young theater)

Weisit said that before the performance in Shanghai last year, she was worried about whether Chinese audiences would be able to accept listening to German through subtitles She can understand this story rooted in Europe, but what makes her happy is that the Chinese audience is very attentive. They can not only understand the humor in the plot, but also show stronger enthusiasm than European audiences. In "Brecht's Ghosts", all characters are represented by actors operating puppets. Brest appears in his classic image with a cigar in his mouth. The awakened undead possesses the puppet. A series of famous historical figures - including Marx, Freud, Kafka, Thatcher Mrs. Wolfe, Lenin - took turns to appear on stage, communicate, argue and sing, reproducing Brest's thoughts on the stage.

This weekend, "Brecht's Ghost" returns to the Young Theater again. This time the crew will bring more Chinese characters (such as Lei Feng) and invite more puppets to interact with the audience during the performance. After the meeting, Weishit accepted an interview with Interface Culture.

When a puppet is brought to life, it has a kind of magic

Weissit has been working in theater for more than thirty years. Her interest in puppetry began with her interest in imitation. She graduated from a performing arts college in East Berlin. At that time, the school offered a major in puppetry. Weisit accepted the systematic study of puppetry, making puppets and performing. Puppetry has since become her lifelong career interest.

Weisit believes that puppet shows are not just for children. She has always been fascinated by European classical drama forms. For example, in ancient Greek dramas, all actors need to wear masks. The "indirectness" of this kind of performance is similar to puppetry. At the same time, it is now a rare opportunity for audiences to watch puppet theater, and she hopes to promote this form of theater. “Puppets are strange but magical things when they appear on stage alongside humans,” she said. “Sometimes, the audience really believes that there is something real about the puppets. When a human being When a puppet 'dies' on stage, it may touch the audience more than if an actor performs death."

It is worth noting that although the puppets produced by Weisit are lifelike and most of them have historical prototypes that we are familiar with, She emphasized that the puppet show does not tell conversations or events that actually happened in history. The purpose of puppetry is to give these puppets a context and manipulate them to tell new stories.

Stills of "Brecht's Ghost" (Photo source: Young Theater)

Weisit is both a director and a puppeteer. There is a special setting in her puppet show: the actors will not be completely invisible like actors in traditional puppet shows, creating a "perfect illusion", but will openly share the stage with the puppets, allowing The audience directly sees the process of actors controlling the puppets. "The audience can choose to believe it, or they can choose not to believe it. They can enter the theater with the thought of 'Come and seduce me,' or they can keep a distance from the show. I like both of these audience states."

To some extent In terms of presentation, the puppet show's presentation method and audience psychology echo Brecht's "alienation" theater theory. According to Brecht, what drama should do is not to arouse the emotional projection of the audience, but to alienate the audience from the drama and rationally reflect on it, that is, to have dialectical consciousness. Drama should not just tell a story, but should reflectively represent the changing "image of the world."

Weisit explained the alienation effect in puppetry this way: "The actors should keep a distance from the characters instead of fully immersing themselves in the characters; we also don't want the audience to completely empathize with the characters in the play, because it makes the audience fall into a certain kind of Emotional drama is too 'easy'. The audience should be a little confused by the empathy they are aroused, they should be moved and at the same time see that it is all an art form being made: it has constructed characters. , with a historical context, these puppets we have allow us to look back at history and talk about the past and the present. These characters are like ghosts of history."

The purpose of using the skeleton to represent Mrs. Thatcher is to illustrate. The erosion of social vitality by neoliberalism

"Brecht's Ghost" will premiere in 2022. The Berliner Ensemble invited Weissert to create a puppet show that reflected Brecht's spirit and had a sense of humor. When

created the play, Weisit first thought about how to connect Brecht's era with the present, and to what extent Brecht's issues could resonate with contemporary audiences. "If Brecht were still alive, what themes would he create new plays around? Which current themes echo the themes he focused on a hundred years ago?"

The answer given by Weischer in "Brecht's Ghost" is Economy and class. In the play, Lao Tzu sings "Song of the Insufficiency of Human Effort"; the miner dwarfs common in German folklore represent those hard-working little people who are currently facing disillusionment with their professional ethics - the desire to achieve social advancement through hard work. The path no longer exists; Ford expounds the essence of Fordism to the beat of crazy drums; Mrs Thatcher debates the rationality of capitalism with the labor puppets, shouting that "there is no such thing as society, only the individual", Tiny, faceless labor dolls flipped to the ground.

Stills of "Brecht's Ghost" (Photo source: Young Theater)

Brecht is famous for his distinctive left-wing thoughts. In 1933, he served as screenwriter for the film "Whose Hands Is the World?" " was released. The film tells the story of the working class who lost their jobs during the Great Depression and had difficulty paying rent. In the film, a worker jumps off a building in despair, and Weischer copied this scene into Brecht's Ghosts. Brecht also composed a song for the film, which called on the proletariat to unite and fight for rights and liberation. It is worth mentioning that this song once got the playwright who was exiled to the United States due to World War II into trouble. During the fervent era of McCarthyism, Brecht was interrogated. The interrogator used this song to question him about communism. tendency. Weisit found that although the situation of today's working class is very different from that of Brecht's era, the class unity and social justice he called for are still important in the current era of class solidification and increasingly severe housing crisis in Germany.

Mrs. Thatcher in the play is an interesting character. Unlike other historical figures who appear, she is not represented by a lifelike doll, but a skeleton. Weisit said that this role is very important because she represents the various impacts of the neoliberal economic system on Western society over the past 40 years. She told Interface Culture that the choice of using a skull to represent Mrs. Thatcher was influenced by the British writer Mark Fisher, who believed that neoliberalism has eroded the vitality of society.

As for Brecht, he himself has become a ghost that hangs over the theater - any playwright working for the Berlin Theater Company works in the shadow of the master. For Weisit, Brecht's most important spiritual legacy is his strong concern for social reality. He believed that drama creators should observe and analyze reality and show this thinking in drama. Weischt also admired Brecht's resilience and adaptability. In his life, he experienced the Weimar Empire, the Nazi period and the Cold War period. In difficult situations, he found a humorous and witty way. "No matter what political environment he is in, he maintains strong creativity, which is very inspiring to me."