The “Off Theatre” Scene

Germany is famous for lush subsidies for its civic and state theatres and opera companies, but in Berlin, the “off” or free theatres flourish.

“We are free in our courage and our risks, but not free in our responsibility in our art,” said the young lady on the other side of the Maxim Gorki Theatre. According to her, the free theatre scene has become ever more professional, international and short-lived.

Many artists who work here, have left the relatively secure, subsidized “official” theatres to be free of hierarchical structures, to pursue favourite projects and to work in a collective of like-minded, committed professionals. For that they will face insecurity and no small financial hardships. “I’d rather live on pogey than to be artistically unhappy. Freedom has its price!” declared the young lady.

Actually, the “off” scene started with a bit of seed money from the Feds and the city in the late 90s – since dried up. The money brought many ‘free” artists to Berlin from other centres and the ‘Off’ scene functions “on a miserable, but possible level”.

It turned out, that we could not see the scheduled show about the closing of a mine in former East Germany, with its shattering of the lives of its workers, - a typical sample of Maxim Gorki’s socialist realism. The reason was a Russian bomb buried since World War II – apparently there are still 3,000 of these relics – near Berlin’s most prestigious museums.

The police cordoned off all of the entire ‘Mitte’ district and I was able to parade down the centre of Unter Den Linden all by myself without any traffic.

However, the bomb was defused and I returned during the “Long Night” for a wildly unconventional staging of Kleist’s classic ‘Amphitryon’, outrageous by Soulpepper standards.