Holger Syme

"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”

Eleven years ago, I wrote to Tom Stoppard to ask about this coup de théâtre from 1949. It took me down an unexpected rabbit hole - in memory of Stoppard, here's what I found.

Screenshot of the article that reads: Young adults are getting spat out into a job market that isn’t nearly as bad as, say, that of the Great Recession, but it also isn’t as lush as it was in the recent past, when they might have watched older friends and siblings get snapped up before graduation. Being in that position would certainly feel terrible, though in the long arc of a professional life, it could be worse.

Screenshot of the article that reads: Yet those numbers don’t tell the full picture. “A lot of those job gains are in the health-care industry,” says Shrivastava, driven by things such as the rising demand for mental health services and an aging population. “The health-care industry alone can’t float a labor market.” If you’re not a newly minted doctor or nurse, you’re probably at least a little bit worse off than your slightly older peers. If you’re looking for a tech job, you might be much worse off. According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, graduates in computer science, computer engineering and graphic design all have unemployment rates at 7% or greater; young workers who hold a number of much-maligned humanities degrees—including English, history and philosophy—are all more hirable.

Look at those humanities degrees (though, let's be clear, all these places shutting down programs don't actually care what the data says)

The Volksbühne theatre in Berlin.

Hello old friend.

It drives me bonkers that we have accepted a short-hand descriptor for computer algorithms that is wildly inaccurate in its description.

Current AI is not intelligent. Since it isn't intelligent, it's not even artificially intelligent.

At best it's an Artifice Intelligence.

So, hey Toronto theatre people — go see Threepenny Opera, which just opened in the new VideoCabaret space on Busy St. It’s raw, it’s in your face, it’s young, and it’s just as it should be. Yeah, I’m biased (most of the actors are former students), but this really is a kickass performance.

Longest line up I’ve ever seen for a Canadian election (first day of advance voting, University-Rosedale). I find this reassuring: Canadians know what’s at stake.

State Terror A brief guide for Americans

"the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man mistakenly sent to a gulag... and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.
This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped"
snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror

Auch nicht umfassend, weil zeitlich recht eng fokussiert, aber zumindest relativ dicht dokumentiert: Joachim Werner Preuß, _Theater im ost-/westpolitischen Umfeld: Nahtstelle Berlin, 1945-1961_ (2004). Das steht aber ziemlich alleine da, und wurde quasi gar nicht rezipiert.

Wallenberg was Swedish. Just FYI.

LIKE WHAT HAPPENED IN GERMANY?!?!?!

What on earth is he talking about?

Kenn ich, hab ich, ganz nett -- aber eine Sammlung von Perspektiven und Erinnerungsfetzen, keine kohärente Geschichte, geschweige denn eine, die wissenschaftlichen Ansprüchen genügen würde. Ne nützliche Quelle -- nicht weniger, aber auch nicht mehr.

Not to denigrate what they publish! Some really important works on recent theatre history (Torben Ibs's book about post-1989 GDR theatres, for instance, or Thomas Wieck's books, or their various Tragelehn publications, etc. etc.).

Not really, no. The TdZ books are great, but the volumes about Berlin theatres are pretty much all retrospectives of a particular Intendanz. Useful sources, but not scholarly studies. I'd think of the magazine as primarily a source as well.

Even the scholarship on specific directors is pretty thin -- or rather, massively uneven. Some major figures have been written about exhaustively, others completely ignored; and often, there's a stark contrast between significant attention in books for general readers and scholarly silence.

I don't think you're wrong about that -- but it doesn't explain why this erasure has persisted among theatre historians. It's easier to find general cultural historians writing about this stuff than specialists!

No other Western country has theatre archives as amazingly dense and rich as Germany. And yet, the fantastically detailed and deeply informed books that could be written with that basis just don't exist. Frustrating and weird.

It occurred to me today that I didn't really have a good sense about how the Gorki was established (as the only East Berlin theatre founded after 1945 that still exists), and there's just no scholarly literature about this, as far as I can tell.

David Barnett's book about the Berliner Ensemble is great, and profoundly researched -- there is NOTHING like this in German, about any other Berlin theatre.

Just whined about this in German, but in case any non-Germanophone theatre scholars here have thoughts: why is it that there's virtually no scholarly literature on the history of Berlin theatres, especially before the 1990s?

Aber kaum was davon kam aus der Wissenschaft. Warum ist das so? Es gibt nirgends in der westlichen Welt spannendere Theaterarchive als in Deutschland. Aber keiner scheint sie wissenschaftlich erst zu nehmen und zu nutzen. Wieso?

Zum DT gibt es wenigstens seit letztem Jahr das Buch von @estherslevogt.bsky.social -- auch auf reicher Quellenarbeit basierend. Aber nicht unbedingt eine wissenschaftliche Arbeit. Dann noch Hannah Speichers Diss (nach 1989) und Alexander Weigels Buch aus den 90ers und ein paar Bände aus DDR-Zeiten.

Sowas gibts für die anderen Berliner Theater gar nicht. Und übrigens nicht nur für die Ostberliner Häuser. Die Schaubühne ist fast genauso wenig erforscht. Da kann man schöne Hochglanzbände kaufen, aber sonst... ziemlich mau.

Barnetts Studie könnte beispielhaft sein, ist aber, soweit ich sehen kann, in Deutschland quasi nicht rezipiert worden. Dichte, archivbasierende und quellenreiche Arbeit, mehr an der Geschichte & Politik der Institution interessiert als an Inszenierungen, aber nicht nur.

Gar nicht tagesaktuell, aber: wieso interessiert sich eigentlich fast kein deutscher Theaterwissenschaftler für die Geschichte der Berliner Theater? Zur Volksbühne vor Castorf? Nix. Zum Gorki vor 1990? Auch nix. Zum BE? Auf Deutsch nix. Auf Englisch, wenigstens David Barnetts monumentales Buch.

Why is she so vile?

Take Action to Save the National Endowment for the Humanities After effectively shutting down the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) this week, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency is now targeting the National Endowment fo...

Friends, we are disappointed to report that our NEH grant was terminated overnight. The same was true for thousands of other projects. Please join us in protesting these outrageous actions by the Trump administration. aaslh.org/take-action-...

The claim that the destruction of essential civilizational institutions is being done in the name of the Jews is itself a form of antisemitism—cultural vandalism carried out in our name.

That, my friends, is rank bullshit.

I'm not a particularly fancy man, but I've been in academia a long time, and I don't recall "don't ever discuss material that's extraneous to the class" ever having been mentioned as a "core tenet" of academic freedom.

Given that the current US government is so closely aligned with those very parties, most of which do not govern their respective countries in the EU, I’d say Canada would still be better off with closer ties to Europe than to the US.