It’s one of the clichés of the theatrical world: for Anglo-Saxons, weirdness starts at Calais, and by the time you reach Germany all bets about rational staging are off. Conversely, a number of continental Europeans (and also younger Britons) believe that Anglophones are ridiculously hidebound in their theatrical expectations and take virulently against anything different simply for being different. There is a grain of truth in each view, but scarcely more than that. By fortunate coincidence, late November offered a remarkable opportunity to test the reality: within the space of a week, three Berlin theatres each presented the German première of a work by a British playwright from the past couple of years.
    
Simon Stephens has often publicly expressed enthusiasm and admiration for the adventurous productions of his plays staged by Sebastian Nübling; indeed, it was Nübling’s presentation of Stephens’ Three Kingdoms, seen in London at the Lyric Hammersmith last year, that crystallised – or polarised – this debate in a British context. Nübling’s production of Stephens’ Morning therefore makes for especially instructive viewing. Sean Holmes’ première of Morning in 2012 was as spare as Stephens’ writing characteristically is: the actors from the Lyric’s Young Company gave direct, unadorned performances, leaving us to assemble our own account from this portrayal of two teenage girls killing the boyfriend of one of them, seemingly for no reason.
    
Nübling’s production, visiting Berlin from the Junges Theater of Basel, is likewise direct, but where Holmes left the uncertainties of adolescence to echo through the gaps in Stephens’ writing, Nübling and his cast fill those gaps with noise, music, physicality in which horseplay is indistinguishable from violence. The youngest member of the company (although only one is over 20) plays a solitary snare drum as if he were Bobby Gillespie in the early days of the Jesus And Mary Chain. This is a Mary Chain-esque vision of teendom, with classic emotional mix-ups swathed in behavioural sheets of howling feedback (although I could happily never again see clouds of flour used as a vague analogue for teen spirit). The effect, paradoxically, is to clarify matters. We still have little or no idea why protagonist Stephanie did such a thing, but we now somehow grasp how she could. As regards clarity, the Maxim Gorki Theater’s presentation also included an element which was for me both novel and necessary: surtitles translated the dialogue from the youngsters’ thick Schwyzertüütsch into a more standard form of German. I guess one often feels that teens of any kind need such surtitles.
    
Martin Crimp’s In The Republic Of Happiness raised a number of hackles when offered as an anti-Christmas presentation at the Royal Court last year. The woman sitting beside me when I saw it there kept up a running commentary on her annoyance until I in turn let loose at her.. and then realised (it seemed) that the play’s very purpose was to rankle, by not just showing us how hollow all today’s canards about autonomy and self-fulfilment are, but conveying their fraudulence feelingly. It seems odd to criticise Rafael Sanchez’s production for the Deutsches Theater by saying that I didn’t find it nearly so irksome. The first section, portraying a dysfunctional middle-class family Christmas, seems here more a straightforward comedy of manners than a sly and insinuating indictment of us who are watching it, and the third and final segment shows further explicit strife rather than bright but insubstantial pseudo-resolution. The social critique remains, but it carries the lesser weight of something heard rather than experienced. Clarity at the expense of subtlety and complexity.
    
Even the clarity vanishes with Sanchez’s decision to place his interval, and a major set change, between the first and second of the Five Essential Freedoms of the Individual which form the choric middle section of the play. True, the choice is between preserving Crimp’s wildly unbalanced timing by breaking three-quarters or so of the way through, or alternatively stopping mid-act and thereby also destroying the sense of a Dantesque triptych; this production, surprisingly, plays safe with our expectations about scheduling.
    
Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs was the most admired of a trio of plays presented in a touring tent by Paines Plough in 2011-12. In it, an unnamed couple superimpose the intimate and the global as they debate the personal and ecological issues of having a baby in our population-spiralling, resource-greedy world. Katie Mitchell’s production for the Schaubühne (retitled Atmen, “Breathe”) maintains the preoccupations which motivated her 2012 Royal Court production Ten Billion, as well as other longer-held fixations.
    
I have seen shows before which pretended to be powered by a performer pedalling a bicycle/generator, and the fanSHEN company’s last couple of productions have genuinely derived their power from the physical activity of audience or community, but Atmen is literally driven by the performers. Not entirely literally, though: Christoph Gawenda and Lucy Wirth can’t generate enough electricity simply by exercise-biking through the piece on their own, so a quartet of supernumeraries at the sides of the stage also keep thanklessly pedalling. And the modest amounts generated mean that, after 20 or so years, Mitchell has at last found an objective rationale for her old fondness for staging work in dim lighting. Above the stage, an LED display ticks off the increasing global population: 71 minutes of performance correspond to just under 15,000 births. I got the impression that the Berlin audience watched dutifully rather than raptly, with less response to the play’s vein of sardonic humour than I expected, and as if – a reservation I often have with Mitchell’s work – the conceptual tail were wagging the dramatic dog.
    
So, do German directors – or British directors working as, so to speak, honorary Germans – really throw whatever they fancy into their stagings? On these showings, rather the reverse: what seems left-field and gratuitous is usually a considered attempt to animate the core of the play. They trust their audiences, and rightly, to see beyond the spectacle and interpret these non-literal configurations. What is especially heartening, though, is the implied converse: that British directors likewise trust their viewers to interpret absences.

Written for the Financial Times.