Falk Richter

‘Wartainment’ and Falk Richters ‘Sieben Sekunden’ as a culmination of his ‘war’ with the media - by Victoria Patterson, Dublin

‘Wartainment’ and Falk Richters ‘Sieben Sekunden’ as a culmination of his ‘war’ with the media. Does the theatre still have potential to be a dynamic and forceful forum on global issues in today’s media-saturated world?

I. Falk Richter: Raising consciousness

Falk Richter has been described by Berliner Schaubühne foreman Thomas Ostermeier as ‘Teil der Bewusstseinsindustrie’ and as someone who ‘diese Rolle ehrlich hinterfragt.’ He is certainly an incredibly innovative and politically engaged young writer, director and academic. However, since he is not yet fully appreciated, it is necessary to provide some background information and details on his early successes that made him so popular (and unpopular) with the press and with the large theatres in Germany’s major cities.

After trying his luck as an amateur actor, Richter’s interest soon took him into directing. He started writing and directing his own plays whilst still studying Linguistics, Philosophy and Theatre Directing under Jürgen Flimm and Christof Nel at the University of Hamburg.

At the age of twenty-three he brought out his first experiment ‘Portrait, Image, Konzept,’ which was immediately taken up by the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg. Despite complaints from the University that Richter was using his own texts, ‘Wir wollen Regisseure und keine Autoren ausbilden,’ he was not inspired by the plays available to him, ‘Junge Leute, die mit Anfang 20 in der Unterhaltungsindustrie mehr verdienen als der Kanzler- so etwas lässt sich aus keinem Klassiker herausfiltern.’ Questions about character’s motives and plot could not be answered by Richter during his studies and he developed his own style, using the language of the stage instead. This aspect of his work reflects the ever-present friction between the world of academic and practical theatre. Despite misunderstandings from his lecturers in Hamburg, his first play ‘Kult,’ which brought together strands of his student work with Bibliana Beglau and Mark Hosemann, was performed at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 1996.

Richters plays speak out loudly against the godlike omniscience of the media and its motors; Neo-liberalism and globalization, which we will examine in depth at a later stage, and the effect this has on his ordinary characters. ‘Alles. In einer Nacht’ takes place in a hotel room, where a woman is trying to contact her lover by telephone. Most of the printed characters in the text are numbers.

In order to reflect the lack of authenticity they saw in the real world, Richters ‘mobile family’ worked on new performance methods using constantly-changing identities and images to try and find ‘Eine andere Vorstellung davon, was Realität ist. Ein Lebensmodell, welches stark von den Medien geprägt ist.’

In his play ‘Nothing Hurts,’ which premiered in Utrecht, Holland in 1999 and which was then invited to the ‘Berliner Theatertreffen’ in 2000, Richter investigates the sensitivity of the human psyche. The play investigates the human need for other humans, juxtaposing the sex act and the act of violence in an attempt to portray the hopeless abyss within man, which man tries to satisfy by using and abusing other flawed humans.

‘Gott ist ein DJ,’ which premiered in Mainz in 1999, is a satire of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘Reality TV’ television programmes such as ‘Big Brother.’ In the play, a TV presenter and a DJ live in a museum gallery space in which they ‘perform’ their lives into a live cam for the entertainment of the internet public.

At this point, Richter was regarded as the “German answer” to the “British wave” drama. This is true to the extent that Richter indeed found inspiration in the courage of British ‘In-Yer-face’ playwrights to express a contemporary ‘Zeitgeist’ in the 1990’s, an age where British theatre lay in tatters, even though it was to be through the depiction of gay heroin addicts eating ‘plastic dinners’ and selling phone sex to pay off debts to their dealers. Richters plays, in contrast, depict contemporary characters and voices, enclosed in a similar postmodern ‘Alltag,’ in which they struggle, not with drug addiction, but with the tides of the ‘sea’ of electronic multimedia in which they find themselves submerged. The two characters in ‘God is a DJ’ have literally let themselves drown in this sea.

Reflecting his preoccupation with the world of the media, Richters shows are multimedia extravaganzas, including multimedia aspects such as, as we have seen, webcams, videos and electronic music and therefore showing no attempt to hide his close contact with the trendy ‘underground’ culture of his time, another of the criticisms often directed at his work. We can see, therefore, that his productions directly reflect the content of his texts. Indeed Richter’s role could even be described as that of a ‘literary DJ’ as he is constantly ‘sampling’ his own work. Incidentally, music often plays a narrative role in his work, rather than functioning as a background effect.

In a transition which has been described as going from pop to politics , Richter wrote and staged his play ‘Peace’ at the Schaubühne in June 2000, after a trip to Kosovo. Using Kosovo as its background Richter portrayed a western media-orientated world, ‘die von der Vermarktung der Katastrophen und Kriege lebt.’ The subtitle of the play reads ‘the world outside is real,’ reflecting his concern with contemporaneous society and world politics. This was his first play dealing directly with the theme of war.

The next war play, Richter directed was British author Caryl Churchills fantastic ‘Far Away,’ at the Schaubühne in 2001. The play depicts a surreal, paranoid apocalypse; a state of total war on earth where the net of alliances is forever changing so that no one can know which animal species is allied with which US company, with which natural element or with which splinter group. Even nature plays a role in this war, and is not to be trusted. Richter then went on to direct two more British plays; Sarah Kane’s ‘4.48 Psychose’ and Mark Ravenhill’s ‘Polaroids’ during his position as ‘Hausregisseur’ at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich. Norwegian Jon Fosse’s ‘Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder’ would be his next project there, which, not unlike other ‘experimental’ performances at the Schauspielhaus since 2000, was slated in a ‘Nazi-esque’ comment by the SVP as being ‘pornographisch und entartet.’ More details explaining the grounds for these comments will be given at a later stage.

In this dissertation my main focus will be Richters ‘satirical anti-war drama’ ‘Sieben Sekunden’, which was written just before the outbreak of the Iraq war in March 2003. Like Churchill’s ‘Far Away,’ the play refers to a war which is predicted to take place in the future, in 10 or 15 years time, when George W. Bush’s son is President of the United States, thanks to a sophisticated system of fixing the election results, so that the same family ‘Clan’ stays in power.

‘Sieben Sekunden’ was directed by Richter at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich in October 2003. At this ‘Doppelvorstellung,’ Roland Schimmelpfennig’s ‘Für eine bessere Welt’ was also performed using the same actors in a juxtaposition of similar and contrasting themes and perspectives. In my dissertation, I will limit my analysis of the war play ‘Für eine bessere Welt’ to some brief comments and concentrate on Richter’s shorter, more experimental play, which deals more directly with the theme of the media.

II. The omnipresence of the media: globalisation and neo-liberalism as its motors.

As it is my aim in this dissertation to discuss the media and the threat it poses to the political nature of the theatre in today’s society, it is necessary to look at how modern technology has changed the way people have communicated throughout the centuries. The oral culture, which existed around one hundred thousand years ago meant that poetry, stories and memories were the most important means of communication. Then, the writing and printing culture, which emerged around five thousand years ago meant that linear, rational and abstract thought were needed. Since the late 1800s, the industrial revolution and the emergence of photography, film, radio, television, computers, an ‘electronic culture’ has taken over. This has meant that communication has quite literally been revolutionized. In the ‘Information age,’ digital, high tech computers, internet and mobile phones represent the main means of communication in our Western culture.

Two important and interconnected economic phenomena have grown up around this fast-moving society; globalization and Neo-liberalism. It will be difficult to grasp what lies at the core of Falk Richters ‘Sieben Sekunden’ without a clear understanding of these, as yet, relatively misunderstood concepts.

Globalization is the name for the process of increasing the connectivity and inter-dependence of the world's markets and businesses. This process has speeded up dramatically in the last two decades as technological advances in telecommunications infrastructure and the rise of the internet make it easier for people to travel, communicate, and do business internationally. In general, as economies become more connected to other economies, they have increased opportunity but also increased competition. Thus, as globalization becomes a more and more common feature of world economics, powerful pro-globalization and anti-globalization lobbies have arisen. The pro-globalization lobby argues that globalization brings about much increased opportunities for almost everyone, and increased competition is a good thing since it makes agents of production more efficient.

The two most prominent pro-globalization organizations are the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum. The World Trade Organization is a pan-governmental entity (which currently has 144 members) that was set up to formulate a set of rules to govern global trade and capital flows through the process of member consensus, and to supervise their member countries to ensure that the rules are being followed. The World Economic Forum, a private foundation, does not have decision-making power but enjoys a great deal of importance since it has been effective as a powerful networking forum for many of the world's business, government and not-profit leaders.

The anti-globalization group argues that certain groups of people who are deprived in terms of resources are not currently capable of functioning within the increased competitive pressure that will be brought about by allowing their economies to be more connected to the rest of the world. Important anti-globalization organizations include environmental groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace; international aid organizations like Oxfam; third world government organizations like the G77; business organizations and trade unions whose competitiveness is threatened by globalization like the U.S. textiles and European farm lobby, as well as the Australian and U.S. trade union movements.

Like globalization, neo-liberalism is a fairly new phenomenon. In short, neo-liberalism promotes free trade, privatization, deregulation, competitiveness, social-spending cutbacks and deficit reduction. Radical human rights activist Susan George recently said at a conference, that if a politician had, in 1945 or 1950, ‘seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neo-liberal toolkit,’ he or she ‘would have been laughed off the stage or sent off to the insane asylum.’ However things have changed a lot since then.

Relevant in the context of ‘Sieben Sekunden,’ and therefore also in this piece of writing, is the effect of these two phenomena on the media, and in turn, on human beings. Globalisation ensures that the media rests, in this day and age, in the hands of global media ‘empires.’ In 2000, only ten media conglomerates accounted for more than two thirds of the $250-275 billion in annual worldwide revenues generated by the communications industry. As I will illustrate, this hegemonic aspect of the media industry has increasingly dominated the minds of social thinkers.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) saw the media as being owned by the dominant classes in a society who use them as a mechanism to serve their own interests. They certainly do play a major role in the transmission of ideologies. It is generally accepted that the voices which are heard in the media belong largely to those least likely to criticise the prevailing distribution of power and wealth. These trans-national media corporations are therefore increasingly able to control global cultural flows and in this way, shape people’s identities and the structure of desires around the world.

French structuralist Louis Althusser (1918-1990) saw the media as an ideological state apparatus, as a social institution which reproduces the dominant ideology, independent of the state, although it is true that media practices are varied and that people are not always just ‘passive victims.’

The famous philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) talks of ‘mass deception’ and ‘anti-enlightenment’ and suggests that media consummation leads to ‘blind subservience to authority.’

The commercial control of the media means that global cultural ‘reality’ is saturated with formulaic TV shows (for example ‘Reality TV’ such as ‘Big Brother,’ which, as we have already seen, are parodied in Richter’s ‘Gott ist ein DJ’) and mindless advertisements. Since news is less than half as profitable as entertainment, partnerships and alliances between news and entertainment companies are often made, hence the terms infotainment and docudrama amongst others, and the lack of actual ‘information’ that the television-viewer is supplied with.

II.1. ‘Culture is in danger’: The globalization of culture

In a chapter called ‘Culture is in danger’ of his critique of globalization, ‘Firing back,’ Pierre Bourdieu highlights the present threat to culture due to globalisation.
‘What is currently happening to the universes of artistic production throughout the developed world is entirely novel and truly without precedent: the hard-won independence of cultural production and circulation from the necessities of the economy is being threatened, in its very principle, by the intrusion of commercial logic at every stage of the production and circulation of cultural goods.’ Bourdieu fears the loss of critical powers and the autonomy of art and stresses that artists must resist incorporation if they are to provide an independent critique, which is, of course, which all artists strive for.

Cultural globalisation is defined as the intensification and expansion of cultural flows across the globe. The global cultural flows of our time are generated by these same media empires mentioned above that rely on powerful communication technologies to spread their message.

The ‘Duisburger Akzente’ culture festival which bears the name ‘Endstation Amerika’ questions, ‘Die Chancen und Risiken einer kulturellen Hegemonisierung durch amerikanischen Ideen, Produkte und Haltungen.’ The legitimacy of a ‘Durchamerikanisierung der Gesellschaft is another aspect of today’s society which Richter satirises in ‘Sieben Sekunden.’ The spectator is told with intended humour that, at the point of the fighter pilots imminent crash, his family are eating;

‘Donuts aus dem Dunkin Donut Drive Thru neben dem Walmartgeschäft, gleich bei der McDonald’s-Filiale in der Drive Thru Mall neben dem Highwayzubringer, am Rande der Wüste.

I will now come back to the issue of the events surrounding Richters position as ‘Hausregisseur’ when in Zürich. A central policy of neo-liberalism not yet mentioned is fiscal austerity in terms of government spending. This has been evident in arts budgets across European countries in the last ten years. Neo-liberalism cherishes a free market and prioritizes private companies. The budget must always rule over artistic experimentation. Philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer’s term ‘culture industry,’ neatly captures the idea of the profit motive being nakedly transferred on to cultural forms. They assert that true culture dissolves in the face of this commercial marketplace and that media products are commodities through and through and culture and human beings are debased because of this.

An example of this is provided in the context of the ‘Sieben Sekunden’ production in Switzerland, where official and financial support is lavished on opera and ballet and theatre is left to fend for itself. Richter will attest to the fact that on the Swiss theatre scene, directors are driven to waste their energy fighting bureaucracy when they should be creating plays. The ‘Theatre Populaire Romand’ and ‘Das Theater für den Kanton Zurich’ are for this reason presently fighting for survival. As ‘Hausregisseur’ in Zurich, Richter was outraged by the fact that a well respected team of artists, including Christophe Marthaler were almost dismissed by the ‘Verwaltungsrat’ for the politically and aesthetically radical sketches they were performing. Since the attempted dismissal in 2002 of Christophe Marthaler by the ‘Verwaltungsrat’ and the questions aroused by the scandal, the direction of the Schauspielhaus in Zurich has pledged to make sure that the quality of theatre is no longer suppressed by financial concerns.

‘Uns hat dieses Ergebnis motiviert, Diskussionen, die um das Theater geführt wurden, wieder zu Diskussionen zu machen, die im Theater stattfinden, Themen, die uns alle betreffen, zu Theaterstücken zu machen, die uns alle berühren, und über Geld auch in einer anderen Sprache als der der Zahlen zu sprechen.’

This time, the importance of culture in the face of financial concerns is asserted. Perhaps the Swiss theatre will improve. But for how long will resistance be possible?

II.2 ‘Wartainment’ in the media.

In this part of my dissertation I am going to look at news coverage of war in the past few years. Relevant in ‘Sieben Sekunden’ is the effect that trans-national media companies have on ‘wall-to-wall’ news channels such as ‘CNN’ and ‘Fox News’ as such news channels are one of Richter’s satirical targets in the play. Functional analysis may suggest that news serves an important information function in modern societies. Conflict theories assert, however, that news presentation serves ideological functions and serves to mystify what is really going on through bias. One thing is certain; independent journalism is a thing of the past.

This idea is especially worrying in relation to war coverage. Noam Chomsky, who has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy compares the war to a baseball match and the news media to cheerleaders. ‘I haven't looked at TV except sporadically, including CNN. My impression (it's only that) is that it's basically cheerleading for the home team. Almost worthless, except that one can tease out the basic facts if one can stand the incredible bias, not even concealed. Press coverage is somewhat more complex, though it still overwhelmingly proceeds within the anticipated propaganda framework of an invading army.’

In this context, the German coinage ‘Wartainment’ will be self-explanatory. The idea of conflict as entertainment is not a new phenomenon. Conflict is a key part of drama. One only has to start at the very origins of theatre as ‘conflict’ to see this. However the idea of real war providing entertainment for viewers brings a new inhuman edge to the situation.

British Muslim writer Sarah Louise Baker suggests that those who watch the news on TV should start taking notes as they watch. ‘The average TV diet has made people lose touch with reality. They are used to watching drama where the actors play dead and then get up all better again. The language Western journalists use about war makes it seem like a theatre, a spectator’s event.’ Baker goes on to suggest that notes should be taken when watching news on TV in order for the spectator critically engage with what he is watching.

Of course, Western audiences, whether consciously or subconsciously, will be familiar with the idea of war as entertainment. War films and war-themed computer games are common fare for the western consumer.

War films mean big money for filmmakers. ‘Sieben Sekunden’ is a satire of American war films. The voice of ‘Brad’ at the beginning of the play contrasts sharply with the average ‘war hero’ of a Hollywood ‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘Platoon,’ films for which Richter doesn’t mind admitting a violent dislike, even though they might be described by some as ‘anti-war films.’ Brad bears, for example, no resemblance at all to the manly, charismatic, gritty Willard of ‘Apocalypse now,’ the officer ‘in control,’ the veteran, the born leader, whose unquenchable desire for the adventure of battle leads him back to Vietnam.

‘-Ich verstehe nicht. Was ist los?

-Ich brenne

-Ich komme ins Schleudern.’

It is certainly clear that this pilot has absolutely no control over the predicament in which he finds himself. He has no control over where bombs are thrown as everything is controlled from headquarters and he is told exactly when to launch missiles. ‘Der Computer arbeitet selbständig.’ This is representative of the lack of power of the common soldier. He is, just like the characters of Tom and Joy in ‘Electronic City,’ just another part of ‘Das System.’ In this way, we can compare the characters in ‘Sieben Sekunden’ to characters in plays such as Ernst Toller’s ‘Die Maschinenstürmer.’ Humans are once again debased and only valuable in serving functions in the ‘machinery’ of ‘Das System’ or being able to function with the machinery, which reigns supreme.

‘Sieben Sekunden’ being a play and, of course, not a film, we are not forced, thankfully, to see the action through the metanarrative of Coppola’s camera, which, incidentally ignored the Vietnamese point of view completely in favour of a macho gaze on ‘Playboy bunnies.’ Instead, in ‘Sieben Sekunden,’ we are provided with several views. Not only is the spectator not permitted to overlook the perspective of the country that is being bombed;

-Schreie? Hört er Schreie?

But the spectator is able to hear six different voices giving six possible scenarios just before Brad crashes. Then, at the end of the play, the spectator experiences a completely different ‘Realitätsebene.’ The theatre is suddenly turned into a Hollywood film studio and he or she hears a Hollywood director’s voice telling the actors that the ‘film’ is not dramatic enough. In other words, that the monotony of mass killing is not entertaining enough for the viewer. There is not enough blood, there is not enough gore. There is not enough drama.

‘Nein, das hat mich gar nicht berührt, all diese Menschen, die kenn ich ja auch gar nicht, die seh ich ja nicht mal, bevor die sterben.’

Richter worked in Zürich with a choreographer on the military aesthetic of the show, the best example of which is in the photo of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play- Appendix, Photo 6) Richter was especially interested, at the time, in military propaganda videos and took inspiration from ‘propagandistische Dokumentarfilm’ queen Leni Riefenstahl and her shrewd portrayal of the aesthetics of fascism in ‘Triumph des Willens,’ an account of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg. The influence of this aesthetic idea can also be seen in the text itself, as Brad philosophises on the military beauty of a ‘swarm’ of military aircraft.

‘Es liegt eine Schönheit in dieser Kraft, dieser Präzision’

Another completely different war film from which some aesthetic ideas were taken was ‘Achtung, fertig, Charlie!’

Richter is unmerciful in his portrayal of war-hyped America in ‘Sieben Sekunden.’
With an ambience akin to the ‘United-States-of-fear’ elements of Michael Moore’s 2003 film, ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ the spectator is told of a ridiculously melodramatic emergency newsflash, which interrupts usual television programmes.

‘Irgendwas wird passieren, man weiß nicht was, aber es ist gefährlich, es wird gefährlich, die Bevölkerung wird aufgerufen, so viel an Vorrat zu kaufen, wie in ihren Wagen paßt, die Fenster abzudichten und die Häuser nicht mehr zu verlassen.’

The sexualisation of war, religious frenzy, ‘islamo-phobia,’ military obedience, ‘gung-ho’ patriotism, war-mongering attitudes evident in some of the speeches in the play also receive a satirical nudge in the ribs. It is therefore not just films and media that are satirized in ‘Sieben Sekunden.’

Of course, war films are not the only war entertainment available to Westerners either. There are also a multitude of war-orientated computer games on the market. Nothing escapes Richter’s satirical knife. Indeed ‘Sieben Sekunden’ brings home the idea of war as being just like one big computer game to those who are taking part in it. The simile of Brad’s constant comparison of what he sees on the screen of his fighter plane to ‘dieses neue Computerspiel Sega Megasearch 2: Behind Enemy Lines’ refers directly to the modern digitalization of the ‘battlespace’ (as opposed to battlefield.) Just as old fashioned war-themed board games such as ‘Risk’ have been updated to digital experiences, so ‘old fashioned’ trench warfare has been updated to high-tech precision bombing from top-of-the-range fighter jets. War itself is being turned more and more into a sort of all-encompassing computer game. The war can be transmitted live from thousands of kilometers away and new precision bombs and missiles have been invented, which are programmed to find their aim themselves. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, which are being made smaller and smaller (UAVs) have tiny cameras are attached to record live action. Some UAVs are the size of a hand.

A recent advertisement I saw on the internet for a computer game called Halo TM 2 reads, ‘You have destroyed hostile forces. You have neutralized parasitic life form.’ The language in the advertisement, a sort of robotic, ‘Star Wars’ style discourse, bears a striking resemblance to the dialogue of some of the voices used by Richter.

In ‘Sieben Sekunden,’ the entire Arab world is juxtaposed with Western society as representing the good guys and bad guys respectively.

‘Thank God we’re fighting on the right side and not on the wrong one!’

Richter’s use of language in ‘Sieben Sekunden,’ the sound effects and onomatopoeic dialogue of the speakers resembles the use of comic-strip dialogue, such as the exclamatory ‘Whaam!’ ‘Takka takka’ ‘Bratatatata!,’ in the paintings of pop art painter Roy Lichtensteins ‘war paintings.’

-Ein Aufschlag
-Ein Crash
-Eine Explosion

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in the beginning Richter was called a pop artist by critics. Pop art is art that uses themes drawn from popular culture. In fact Richter’s plays do not draw themes drawn from popular culture. They engage critically with society and its discontents, and mock the one-dimensionality of the pop culture through a satirical mimicry of its aesthetics.

However Richter’s work could be called pop in the sense of popular, buying into a pop culture, in the sense of appealing to or expected to appeal to popular taste generally, because this is his aim. A quotation from American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, talking about his war paintings might prove to be interesting here.

‘A minor purpose of my war paintings is to put military aggressiveness in an absurd light. My personal opinion is that much of our foreign policy has been unbelievably terrifying, but this is not what my work is about and I don’t want to capitalize on this popular position. My work is more about our American definition of images and visual communication.’

And of course, in the same way, Richter’s work is also a satire of US media aesthetics and the dramatisation of war in news reporting.