Dramaturgy

Summary

‘And what do you hope to achieve with this?’ I still remember his Augsburg dialect whispering in my right ear. It was the voice of Caspar Neher, that great man of the theatre: set designer, librettist, friend and colleague of Bertolt Brecht who had immortalized him in several poems. Neher had sat himself behind me at the director's desk, had watched me at work for a while, and then this: ‘And what do you hope to achieve?’ It felt like having a bucket of cold water poured over me and made me start all over again. For some reason or other, Neher had directed his furor pedagogicus at me. And what a pedagogue he was! His lessons were strict, and often spiced with irony and sarcasm.

‘We need one more chair’, I said in the dusty furniture storage room. ‘What kind of chair?’ he asked promptly. ‘Empire style would be best’, I suggested. ‘Really. What do you mean by “Empire”?’ I quickly sketched a chair. ‘Here, Empire, you see … Napoleon.’ ‘Aha. So you mean Louis XVI.’ And so it went on the whole day.

Once, we were walking through the garden of the Belvedere in Vienna when he stopped at the steps that lead up to Prince Eugen's magnificent palace. He took out a small ruler that he always kept with him. ‘Measure it!’ – ‘What?’ – ‘The steps!’ – ‘47 × 11.5 centimetres.’ ‘If you ever want elegant steps’, he said, ‘use these’, at which he stuck his ruler back in his pocket. On another occasion, he grumbled: ‘I'll take any colour as long as it's grey.’ And he went on to explain that nature generally prefers muted colours. It uses strong, luminous colours only as a signal meaning ‘Mate with me!’ or ‘I'm poisonous, don't eat me!’ Accordingly, he believed that theatre should use colours in the same way. Neher was the most merciless, incorruptible dramaturge I ever met.

Dramaturgy – it's a grand word that often lacks a proper meaning. How much nebulous gibberish comes along with it! And yet dramaturgy is really something quite simple: what has to be said, and how it must be said to be understood.