Theatre with 
a breath of hope

 

The Isreali director Yael Ronen is a star of Berlin’s theatre scene. She stages the most critical of themes with thoughtfulness, humour and a non-hierarchical approach

 

When is the relationship between people normal? If it is without mistrust? Without aggression, without feelings of guilt? And how deep do the roots of personal history reach through the humus of the past in communities whose relationship is marked by hor­rific violence? Is one generation distance enough, or are two, three or even more needed in order to facilitate an uninhibited encounter between Israelis and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians, Bosnians and Serbs? And is an uninhibited contact desirable at all? These are the issues with which Israeli theatre director Yael Ronen deals in her most important works. Whereby the adjective “Israeli” is already an inadmiss­ible abbreviation for an artist from Tel Aviv living in Berlin with a Palestinian husband and a Viennese grandfather, and who only speaks English in Germany. Yet it may be this very mishmash of cultural connections that enables Ronen to have a more uninhibited access to the buried ripcords that exist between the identities.

Ronen is resident director at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in 
Berlin – where Berlin world culture is staged under the direction of the Armenian-Turkish-German artistic director 
Shermin Langhoff. She had her international breakthrough in 2008 with a piece whose title, Third Generation already took us straight to the heart of the matter. Ten actors from Germany and Israel, three each of which had a Jewish and Palestinian family history, mutually unhinged each other’s convictions and prejudices in that performance. In the course of constant, partly dead serious, partly very funny bickering about what the connections between the Holocaust, the 
formation of the state of Israel and the Palestinian question “actually” are, it became clear in an altogether entertaining way just how intricate things also are in the generation of grandchildren.

 

Yael Ronen uses anti-convulsive means to render dreadful themes like genocide and war so amenable that the plays preserve a certain optimism despite all the strain. With irony and without fear of slapstick, she repeatedly shows up the 
absurdity of gridlocked thought patterns. In a currently successful piece called Common Ground the adult children of refugees belonging to the different parties to the Balkan War take a trip to the sites of that traumatic conflict. Although the piece mainly shows how brittle Berlin friendships become once inherited allocations of blame appear, Ronen’s humour continually undoes the knot of tension so as to rediscover what the people have in common. Perhaps it is the lightness that Yael Ronen radiates, the friendly deliberation repeatedly interrupted by bright laughter that enables her to have such a fundamentally positive impact. Even though she constantly emphasises that her objective is to make façades transparent and uncover the breaches behind apparent consent, her productions are borne along by a breath of hope.

 

As a member of a theatre family – her father Ilan is artistic director of the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv, her mother 
Racher Hafner is an actress, as are her brother Michel and her husband Yousef Sweid – Yael Ronen is not afraid of seductive means of theatre. Whether she adapts a classic like Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, presents an evening about eroticism or, in Graz – where she once worked for many years – fantasises about founding an autonomous theatre commune after the demise of the EU, “the master plan of theatre should be not to bore people,” to quote Ronen. Not only is her attempt to 
develop a political-historical theatre that brings repressed themes to light by means of humour, unusual. Her way of working, which she describes as “very non-hierarchical”, is also remarkable in a German theatre system fixated on dir­ectors. Her projects are developed in improvisations and 
research trips with the actors, who also provide most of the texts from which Ronen then compiles the pieces in such a way as to preserve the strongly personal tone. Her main 
expectation of this joint effort is “to have as many active co-creators as possible.”

For her latest piece she took a whole district of the city as her source. Yael Ronen found the material for The Situation – synonymous for the Middle East conflict – in the behaviour of the numerous exiles from the Levant in Berlin. Lebanese, Palestinians and Israelis in Germany can in fact encounter one 
another in a totally different way to in their homelands. Whether these encounters are really uninhibited and without comedy must be seriously doubted, given that Yael Ronen can create a piece out of them. For that would be normal, and then it would be boring.