A Description and A Response
Wilhelm Tell – the legendary Swiss freedom fighter, marksman, and assassin – is a central figure of Swiss national historiography and deeply intrenched in the Swiss sense of self. Friedrich Schiller’s (who almost ironically never actually visited Switzerland) Wilhelm Tell is a staple of Swiss theatre. Schauspielhaus Zürich – like pretty much every Swiss theatre – stages a new version of Tell every few seasons.
It therefore makes sense that Swiss director Milo Rau has finally staged his own version of Wilhelm Tell in collaboration with Schauspielhaus Zürich. The production – in typical Rau fashion – features a mixture of professional and non-professional actors.
As Rau loves to do, the production opens with Karin Pfammatter and Sebastian Rudolph, two professional actors, describing their connection to theatre in Switzerland using personal anecdotes. Pfammatter recalls performing in a high school production, where she got to kiss her English teacher. This story introduces the audience to Pfammatter’s history with the theatre, Switzerland’s Volkstheater tradition, and Schauspielhaus Zürich’s long history of Wilhelm Tell productions. Schauspielhaus Zürich – led by co-artistic directors Nicolas Stemann, a well-known German director, and Benjamin von Blomberg, a German dramaturg – currently has only three Swiss actors in its ensemble, including Pfammatter and Michael Neuenschwander, who stands alongside Pfammatter during this prologue. Neuenschwander – who performed in another staging of Tell in Zürich in 2013 – plays the cello (maybe a standing bass) during the productions musical interventions marked by the refrain “I’m so tired of Switzerland.” Neuenschwander plays various minor characters such as the tax collector and Stauffacher. He also introduces the audience to the figure of Attinghausen (i.e., Werner, Freiherr von Attinghausen), who he defines as emblematic of Old Switzerland. This is, of course, another Rau trick, using an actor’s connection to a part of the play (a scene or a character) to transition from personal monologue to the reenactment of that moment.
Unlike much of Rau’s previous work, Tell does not employ placards to delineate its different parts (scenes, chapters, acts, etc.) and provide a title to introduce respective themes. Rudolph – one of the theatre’s German actors – enters the stage wearing a black SS uniform. He recalls his part in Christoph Schlingensief’s infamous 2003 production of Hamlet at Schauspielhaus Zürich. This Hamlet sticks out in theatre history because it featured members of the Schauspielhaus’s ensemble alongside (reformed) neo-Nazis as part of a resocialization program. Rudolph recalls how Schlingensief would trapse about in an SS uniform; how unpopular Schlingensief was in Switzerland (he was just too German); his unlikely friendship with Jürgen, a former neo-Nazi who also got nosebleeds when he was excited or nervous; and how the theatre’s then marketing manager (Mr. Müller) tried to prevent the performance from happening… having actual Nazis on the stage, that was just too much. How Mr. Müller forbad the theatre’s technical and production staff from working on the performances, but how – in a surprising show of solidarity – the techs, stage managers (including Sascha Dinevski who also appears in Rau’s Tell), and the rest of the production staff showed up “ganz privat” [in their free time] to make sure the performance happened. Rudolph, in his full SS uniform, obviously – as even he points out – plays Tell’s essential villain: Gessler, the tyrant.
The Schattenlinie – The Shadow Line
In her prologue, Pfammatter reflects on the ensemble’s current diversity – consisting of German, Austrian, American, Czech, and French actors – and compare it to the ensemble housed by the theatre in the 1930s and 40s: An exile ensemble. This ensemble also performed Tell in 1939: an anti-fascist Tell. Rau’s production carefully constructs a clear line between the theatre’s past and present: A dramaturgical Schattenlinie, or shadow line. Pfammatter first introduces the concept of Schattenlinie early in the production. Schattenlinie refers to a natural phenomenon that occurs on mountains: the line on the sides of mountains between where the parts of the mountain sun never touches and the snow never melts, and where the sun strikes the ground and melts the snow. This line that divides snow that is hundreds or even thousands of years old from areas of exposed ground where new life can spring forth. For Tell, the concept of Schattenlinie operates as a metaphor for both struggle between the old and the new, past and the present, and the traditional and the modern, as well as how all these things co-exist in nature. It is also representative of a constructed division, these things can and do co-exist. They are, in fact, part of the same environment and two sides of the same coin: both the frozen and unfrozen ground are Switzerland.
This Schattenlinie is present in performance using an exceptional technological trick – what I consider to be the best trick of the production. A trick that, beyond being what I can only describe as being so slick, ties Rau’s Tell to Zürich’s performative history of Tells (specifically it’s anti-Fascist Tell) and the transformative power of theatre (even classic texts) to respond to the crises of the present.[1]
As I entered the theatre, I noticed – downstage right – an old, boxy, wooden looking device with two big wheels and what looked like old-fashioned audio tape between them. It was later revealed to contain an audio recording of Schauspielhaus Zürich’s 1939 anti-fascist Tell, featuring the famous Swiss actor Heinrich Gretler (M (1931), Heidi (1952), and numerous film and theatre versions of Wilhelm Tell) in the titular role. Rather than explicitly performing excerpts of Tell for the audience, many of the reenacted scenes from Tell – which offer the audience the essential plot points of Schiller’s play[2] – are performed upstage behind a sheer black screen covering the back half of the stage. The scene is filmed and the live video projected onto this screen, although the frustrating and exciting thing with Rau’s work is that not all the scenes are live projections but pre-filmed segments. But here is the trick… on top of many of these live stream performances, the audio from the 1939 Tell is played from the audio device and the live, present-day actors lip sync the Tell dialogue.
When the lip sync is tight and on-point, it is astonishing! What is happening takes a moment to register with the spectator. You get so caught up in watching the Tell scene that you hardly notice the wheels spinning on the spotlighted audio device. It is an astounding illusion, BUT it is a high-risk effect. As soon as an actor falls out and loses the lip sync – which is a real danger when you are working with amateur actors and children – the trick loses its sparkle and the illusion is completely lost.
References – Repetitions – Rau
At its core, Tell is a story about a struggle for freedom and independence. A theme – considering the world we live in and situation we find ourselves in – that is more pressing and urgent than ever. Rau’s Tell is extremely ambitious in that – as a Milo Rau production – is not a straightforward performance of Wilhelm Tell. Instead, the director uses the production to engage with larger philosophical issues: What can Tell tell us about concepts of freedom in Switzerland today? What does freedom mean? What does it look like? Who are the freedom fighters and heroes of today’s Switzerland?
And although this Tell production engages with these questions and won considerable excitement from its Zürich audience, I’m not sure if I – an ignorant Canadian who barely knows Tell and upon whom all the historical and cultural significance of the story is lost – ever found a satisfactory answer.
The figure of Tell bounces among different actors, indicative of the subjective nature of heroes, heroism, and the impossible, intangible concept of freedom. We are presented with a female Tell, a disabled Tell, an Eastern European Tell. The Tell narrative is carefully connected and interwoven into the personal experiences, self-image, and place in the world of its actors.
More transparently than usual, Rau explicitly tells us how his production will situate its actors within the Tell narrative. In a clear reference to the Europa Trilogie, we are told how the production brings “big and small stories” together, operating under a dramaturgical (and historical) postulation (introduced to us in Five Easy Pieces) that “history surprises us where it finds us.”
While Rau’s work is often self-referential – pulling monologues from articles Rau wrote sometimes years earlier for a weekly column or blog post – Tell felt more explicitly referential (at least for the avid spectator of Rau’s work). We see the return of Tarantino’s “Revenge of the Giant Face” first seen in Mitleid. Die Geschichte der Maschinengewehr. In Tell, Rau and his team are finally able to finish their reenactment of this scene: with Tarantino’s machinegun execution of Gessler, aka Rudolph (who, funnily enough, bears a passing resemblance to Sylvester Groth’s Goebbels in Inglorious Basterds), in a movie theatre as the face of Tell’s son stares down at him, laughing and mocking his (long and bloody) demise. We find other examples of the Tarantino-esque violence that Rau enjoys at the top of the production with the murder of the tax collector (Neuenschwander) for trying to seduce a woman. His head is pummeled into a bloody stump for an uncomfortably long period, which is magnified and projected on the screen across the stage. It is Maya Alban Zapta – a professional actor, diversity agent (a contact point for actors experiencing harassment or abuse in the workplace), and activist – who murders the tax collector, thus protecting the woman he harassed.
Like all of Rau’s productions, Tell is a relatively short evening, with a total run time of just under two hours. It uses the personal experiences of the performers to weave together an essentialized Tell: Tell and Gessler’s first encounter, Tell shooting the apple from his son’s head and his arrest, the storm on the lake where Tell escapes, and – of course – the death of Gessler. The chosen scenes are projected in black and white on the onstage screen (using fog to better the quality of the projection), magnifying the actors faces in a highly filmic (Pasolini-esque) way. Since Die letzten Tage der Ceauscus, Rau has used intermedial elements in his productions, playing with live and pre-filmed videos. These projections force the audience to negotiate this intermediality. In Tell, this negotiation is even more complicated as the projection literally covers the stage and is at times in front of the live performance that is still partially visible. Even when it is an explicitly a video – as is the case for Tell’s escape – we must negotiate between the video and the live commentary from Sascha Dinevski, who plays Tell in this scene.
As someone who has seen almost all of Rau’s work, this new form of projection was exciting. There was a breath-taking and unexpected ghosting in Rau’s Tell unlike any of his previous work. Instead of navigating a screen hanging above the stage with the liveness of the stage, the projection now floats like an old movie in front of a slightly obfuscated live performance while the 1939 audio narrates the scene. It is also not always clear if the projection we are seeing is a live or pre-filmed performance, and it is not always clear if the audio overlaying the production is live or pre-recorded or even if the audio is the onstage actors or the 1939 audio.
This use of intermediality speaks to the concept of Schattenlinie running through the production. We are constantly presented with the co-existence of old and new, traditional and modern, classic performance and cinematic videos, even by the juxtaposition of the presentational conversations between performers downstage and representational Tell performance happening upstage.
Rau’s favoured designer Anton Lukas created, as usual, a phenomenal stage design that appears simple but reveals itself to be filled with concealed spaces. It is both effective for the Tell narrative and in depicting a sense of a classic (maybe even stereotypical Switzerland (at least from a Canadian perspective). Downstage is a costume rack (another staple of Rau’s work), a few seats for the actors, and the musical instruments, upstage – behind the red curtain that is pulled back after the prologue – is a small wooden (wedding) chapel with stained glass windows and a bell tower secluded in nature, surrounded by mist, small clumps of grass, and a bright moon.
A Two-Sided Critique
Tell presents us with a collage of the demographics of present-day Switzerland. This Switzerland is made up of a hunter, a disability rights activist, a (former) illegal immigrant, an army officer, a Schauspielhaus stage manager, an old folks’ home nurse, an illustrator, a former forced labourer, a child, and probably several others that I’ve forgotten while writing this response. Tell is an entrance into their personal lives: how they view themselves (we are all the heroes of our own stories after all) and their engagement with Tell (their favourite part of Tell or which character they want to play). Alongside their individual narratives we also see examples of daily life: Cyrill Albisser, the hunter, shows us how he stalks his prey and his Klingon-eqsue victory howl signalling a successful hunt; together with the actors (getting the audience to stand) celebrate the marriage of former illegal immigrant Hermon Habtemariam to the high-ranking army officer Sarah Brunner; and learn about disability activist Cem Kirmizitoprak’s daily struggle with St. Gallen’s over 80,000 stairs.
The strength of bringing so many different people, perspectives, and experiences into a single production is that it makes Rau’s Tell accessible to a larger audience. I have little doubt that this Tell performance will do very well and be (by-and-large) well received.
However, the danger – particularly for a production that deals with larger philosophical issues – that presents itself is that the production fails to really dive into a deeper, more nuanced discussion of freedom. With the time constraints of Tell, everything can only be discussed on a superficial level – at least for the spectator who comes looking for or expecting something deeper. The bigger the cast the less time we get to spend with each individual actor and the less time we get to really dig into their definition of freedom, what they believe in, and their engagement with Tell. The production could have benefited from having about two less actors, which would have given Tell about 10 to 15 minutes more to spend with the other actors. Particularly towards the end of performance, it felt as if we were rushing through the remaining performers. But again, the flip side of more people and perspectives is that it opens the production up to more people, so I’m torn in this critique, because I do understand, but I also long for this depth – what can I say… it’s a character flaw.
Rau’s 2020 Everywoman, which similarly used the classic Jederman [Everyman] as a frame to explore questions of death and dying, featured only two actors (only one of whom was physically present on the stage). It was therefore able to engage in a complex and nuanced discussion. Watching Wilhelm Tell, I really missed that depth, because I know Rau has the capacity to bring this depth and complexity into productions that engage in these philosophical discussions.
Rau’s productions are marked by moments of dramaturgical return, where a detail mentioned early in the production performatively returns later in the production. However, the large cast combined with a tight runtime simply did not allow many of these moments to happen. Although there is one beautiful example of such a return when Sebastian Rudolph finds another former neo-Nazi, a large man with a blood stain on his white sleeveless shirt – his nose always bleeds when he gets nervous or excited, just like Rudolph’s – named Jürgen seated in the audience.
Yet perhaps this oversaturation is indicative a deeper truth about any discussion of freedom.
Wilhelm Tell is the quintessential freedom fighter of the Swiss imagination (maybe of other imaginations to). However, there is an unintentionally tragic aspect to the figure of Tell, which Meret Landolt (one of the amateur actors) identifies in the performance. At the end of Schiller’s play, John – the nephew of the Emperor of Austria – murders his uncle. However, Tell – who also murdered a tyrant – denounces the murder. In the end Tell – who really only wanted to be allowed to continue hunting – doesn’t want things to change. He wants things to remain as they are.
At his core, Tell doesn’t much care about the suffering and servitude of others, he only cares about being allowed to live the way he wants to. Wilhelm Tell thus reveals itself to be about personal, individual freedom but not about a broader, more inclusive but also more difficult concept of freedom. One that considers the nuance of living together or the interconnected issues of responsibility, accountability, and togetherness that are intertwined with freedom. Perhaps it is no longer possible to have a unified discussion of freedom because there is a Schattenlinie of sorts that divides the dialogue. Perhaps the best discussion of freedom is one that simply reports the individual, unrelated perspectives of those involved as Rau’s Tell does.
What I can say about Tell and other reclassification productions (reclassification refers to Milo Rau productions that use classic texts to contextual and frame a contemporary issue within a specific society, e.g., Lam Gods, Orestes in Mosul, Everywoman, even Grief & Beauty) is that love it or hate it, you leave the theatre with thoughts, feelings, and opinions. You cannot leave Wilhelm Tell feeling neutral. Maybe you loved the way the performance engaged with different life experiences and highlighted current discussions in Switzerland. Maybe you feel disappointed that the production didn’t dive deeper into the philosophical discussion or that it chose not to deal with certain issues. Regardless, you feel something and can have long conversations with other audience members at the bar after the performance.
Although I certainly have my own critiques of the show, Tell absolutely inspires a larger, more nuanced conversation about the nature of freedom, heroism, and the individual in modern Switzerland and beyond.
Bührle and the Impossible Ethics of Arts
An interesting and important addition to the evening – perhaps the most political element of Tell – is the discussion (and connected political action[3]) surrounding the controversial figure of German industrialist and art collector Emil Georg Bührle and his continuing legacy in Switzerland.
A brief introduction to Bührle: In Switzerland, Emil Bührle (1890-1956) was an arms manufacturer and exporter, revitalizing the Swiss-based company Werkzeugmaschinenfabrik Oerlikon. During the Second World War, Bührle became Switzerland’s second richest man by supplying weapons to Germany and Italy. In postwar years, the company carried forward this dubious legacy through its involvement in illegal weapons deals. In 2021, it was revealed by Swiss media that in the 1950s and 60s, several of Bührle’s factories (Spinnerei & Weberei Dietfurt AG, Contraves AG, and Werkzeugmaschinenfabrik Oerlikon) used forced labour (specifically underaged labourers) for their production process. Specifically, Swiss welfare offices sent hundreds of underage, “difficult-to-educate” girls to a girls’ home, the Marienheim, which was run by the Ingenbohl sisters and which sent these girls to work in Bührle’s factories.
Sidenote, there is a historical through line of institutionalized trauma where nuns working for what can, at best, be called nominally religious institutions that “housed” and “educated” “difficult-to-teach,” “wild,” or “fallen” girls (children in general), who had been forcibly separated from their families. One need look no further than any number of colonial institutions like Residential Schools in Canada or Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
Enter Irma Frei in Rau’s Tell, one of these so called “difficult-to-teach” girls, who – after being separated from her divorced mother – was forced to work for Bührle until she turned 20. A podium is brought onto the stage and, in a testimonial style performance, Frei – now an elegant older woman – tells the audience how 60 years ago she ended up in Marienheim and her experiences as a forced labourer for the manufacturer.
However, the Bührle issue – particularly for an audience seated in Schauspielhaus Zürich’s Pfauen, kitty-corner Kunsthaus Zürich – is inseparably intertwined with art. Emil Bührle was also an enthusiastic art collector and patron of the arts: Zurich is still home to The Stifung Sammlung E. G. Bührle (Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection) and in 2021, an extension of Kunsthaus Zürich opened with a floor dedicated to paintings and sculptures on a twenty-year loan from the Bührle Foundation. Here’s the rub: Between 1940 and 44, Bührle used his Nazi-acquired fortune to purchase the core of his massive art collection from Nazi-occupied Paris. According to the Wikipedia article on Bührle, “the American Office of Strategic Services Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports 1945-46, state that during the Nazi era, Bührle was an ‘important recipient of looted works of art by purchase from Fischer and Wendland.’” Of the paintings and sculptures currently displayed at Kunsthaus Zürich up to 90 have unclear origins and are suspected of being acquired illegitimately from Jewish families and/or collectors. [4]
A moral question is presented: Should these artworks – acquired by a company we know directly profited from National Socialism, we know is an arms dealer, we know used forced child labour for years, and we know acquired looted, Jewish-owned art – be displayed in one of Switzerland’s most important art museums? Knowing what we know – not conjecture but established fact – can we, as consumers of culture, support such an exhibition? What about the curatorial team or artistic leadership that allows such an exhibition to take place? What about an institution that accepts financial support from such an organization?
Again, this already difficult moral and ethical question becomes more complicated when we consider the already complicated issue of corporate sponsorship in the arts and cultural sector – at institutions like Schauspielhaus Zürich, Rau’s home theatre of NTGent, or Rau’s own production company IIPM.
Is it, in the veritable nightmarescape that is late Capitalism, even possible to produce or display art without taking some sort of blood money? And how can we, as artists, critique other artists and curators without making ourselves hypocrites with our own unethical funding sources? Does it even matter?
Rau nods to this conundrum in Tell when Rudolph, as Gessler, walks to the chapel which now has a banner hung over the entrance that reads: “Hängt den Bührle an ein Schnürle” [“Hang the Bührle with a string,” i.e., “Hang Bührle”]. Gessler – in his black SS uniform – stops rips down the banner and, with no irony in his voice, states that you can’t respond to Nazis with violence because if you do then aren’t you also a Nazi? This small – maybe even easy to miss – moment really embodies the bind political art (even political activists) finds itself in. How do you critique a system you are also a part of? How do you respond to violence without engaging in a form of violence yourself (dialogic, systemic, physical, etc.) yourself?
And again: Does it matter? Isn’t it better to respond to the injustices and violence of the system and take whatever criticism may be levied against you in stride rather
Wilhelm Tell features: Maya Alban-Zapata, Maja Beckmann, Michael Neuenschwander, Karin Pfammatter, Sebastian Rudolph, Emma Lou Herrmann (Live Video), Aleksandar Sascha Dinevski, Cyrill Albisser, Sarah Brunner, Irma Frei, Vanessa Gasser, Oskar Huber, Cem Kirmizitoprak, Meret Landolt, Louisa Maulaz, and Hermon Habtemariam
[1] I will add just as a sidenote, that it was surprising the crises that Rau’s Tell did not take on such as what is currently happening in the Ukraine and Switzerland’s surprisingly un-neutral stance on the conflict. However, it is unfair to expect one production to respond to everything and to continue to adapt throughout the rehearsal process to a world changing at lightspeed.
[2] I desperately tried to read Schiller’s original text but found myself unable to engage with it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a text from Schiller, which makes a very bad German theatre academic but also probably a much happier person.
[3] Rau is using NFTs (which we must acknowledge have their own problems connected to them) to push back again the unethical Bührle collection and its stolen art.
Lost Dramaturgin International 