When Germans go to the theatre, they know to expect the expected.
For three decades, directors have specialised in predictable provocation: nudity, sexualised violence and bloody body horror.
Anything goes on the German stage – unless, that is, it’s a play about sexualised violence in the Catholic Church.
Last month, director Lorenz Nolting was in rehearsals with Ödipus Exellenz, his new adaptation of Seneca’s tragedy, when the production was cancelled abruptly.
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The work was a collaboration with a German survivor of clerical sexual abuse, examining how the rites and rituals of Catholic faith were a unique enabling element in his ordeal.
“A person might have been raped many hundred times by a priest who told them it was God’s will,” said Nolting. “Only as adults did many survivors realise it was even sexualised violence.”
Nolting says the play was cancelled after falling foul of Ulrich Mokrusch, artistic director of the state theatre in the western city of Osnabrück.
Mokrusch, who read the script but attended no rehearsals, took issue with the use of Catholic prayers and rituals in the play – and demanded changes.
After Nolting refused, Mokrusch cancelled the premiere. In a statement, Mokrusch said he found the play used “central tenets of faith for [cheap] theatrical effect ... and I basically didn’t want to see that happen.”
Director Nolting says he was told about the theatre manager’s strong personal faith. Given the artistic freedom enjoyed by theatre directors, however, the conflict and cancellation came as a surprise.
A subsequent surprise: legal letters demanding he sign a non-disclosure agreement and cover the cost of the cancelled production.
In notes Nolting kept of crisis meetings, he says Mokrusch argued he “had to protect his public, in particular Christians in the audience”.
The creative team argued that their play’s provocation was not their use of Catholic rites but their use by abusing priests with their young victims.
Had the theatre’s artistic director come to a rehearsal, Nolting says, he would have seen their efforts to avoid German theatre tropes, with “no fake blood, no upside-down crosses”.
Director Nolting was raised in a Catholic family and says he is familiar with how church structures operate. There is no indication the church intervened directly to cancel the play, he says, but the offstage drama has sent the abuse survivor they were working with back to psychotherapy.
“This clash is a repeat of his own confrontations with the Catholic Church authorities,” said Nolting, who remains hopeful his play can find a second life beyond Osnabrück.
A request for an interview with Ulrich Mokrusch went unanswered.
