One of the opening addresses of this year’s Theatertreffen in Berlin declared, “Artistic diversity is always stronger than populist uniformity.” Whilst accurate on the face of it, in context this threatened disdain for stage realism. It’s true that little of the work on show in the German-speaking world’s most prestigious theatre festival would strike an Anglo-Saxon sensibility as “straightforward”. Sometimes the modish tail wags the theatrical dog: Explorer/Prometheus Unbound, in the subsidiary “Immersion” strand, showed off live motion-capture technology onstage without any conceptual, acting or improvisational skills. (Compare the Royal Shakespeare Company’s use of the same technology in The Tempest, shortly to arrive in London.)

However, the festival jury clearly look more deeply for the central selection of what are considered the ten outstanding productions of the previous year in the Germanophone world. Even when I have been unconvinced by either the staging or the thesis of a piece, it is plain that considerable skill and deliberation have gone into them. Take, for example, 89/90, director Claudia Bauer’s treatment for Schauspiel Leipzig of Peter Richter’s autobiographical novel covering the year or so between the first cracks appearing in the edifice of the DDR and full German unification. I’m not sure that the idea of a “dramatic oratorio” comes off, with eight actors combining with a couple of dozen choristers singing parodic political slogans...but Bauer makes a practical case for the attempt.

I’m afraid I couldn’t pin down Richter’s perspective either. The production loathes both the commercialism and the rise of right-wing extremism that come with the fall of the Iron Curtain: at one point a rendition of the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” is interrupted by the arrival of the largest inflatable sex doll I expect ever to see. But this is not simple Ostalgie for the old, known and fixed regime, since that is likewise excoriated in the first act. In a way this production may be a final opportunity: by the time of next year’s Theatertreffen, the Berlin Wall will have been down longer than it was up.

At least twice during my few days in Berlin I experienced one of my favourite theatrical sensations, which you might call “being pleasantly surprised against my will”. Swiss-born Australian Simon Stone has a strong reputation for “adaptations” of classics which rewrite the text entirely in modern paraphrase. Last year I was distinctly underwhelmed by his version of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman; this year, working with the theatre in his native city of Basel, he has turned his attention to Chekhov’s Drei Schwestern (Three Sisters). The Prozorovs’ country estate becomes a modern lakeside holiday villa, with Lizzie Clachan’s amazingly detailed set more or less constantly revolving so that we see events in every room and beyond.

The military officers who compose the family’s social circle become simply an assortment of friends, wastrel brother Andrej is now a stoner who dreams of designing a killer app, and so on. They speak bluntly, bash out numbers such as Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Bowie’s ‘”Heroes”’ on the piano, and generally find their lives as dreary a succession of little failures as their originals did. Part of me feels that this treatment trivialises the sisters’ spiritual attrition, but if I’m honest I can find no real basis for my hesitancy. It would be fascinating if Stone were to follow up his London production of Lorca’s Yerma (shortly to return to the Young Vic) with an English-language re-creation of this piece.

For me, though, the real revelation was Die Borderline Prozession, staged by Kay Voges, Dirk Baumann and Alexander Kerlin for Schauspiel Dortmund and presented here (unlike most of the productions, which are in the premises of the Berliner Festspiele) in a warehouse in the south-east of the city. One of the briefing notes posted in the venue read “There is nothing to understand, but much to find out”; this I misinterpreted as the dread pronouncement “It means whatever you want it to mean”, which generally makes me release the safety catch on my computer keyboard.

The set-up wasn’t encouraging either: a central pod of several distinct locations, interior on one side, exterior on the other, traversed by two banks of seating such that any given viewer can see events only on one side directly and has to rely on video links for the other. Twice during the performance we are urged to “change your perspective”, i.e. go and sit somewhere else. Characters process around the central pod singing all-purpose pseudo-profundities, then peel off to enact gradually changing, complexifying loops of behaviour. (The piece is subtitled A Loop On What Divides Us).

Gradually, however, this collage of banality acquires heft: a marital bedroom becomes a hospice, a shower in the neighbouring bathroom morphs slowly into a suicide. Meanwhile, onscreen captions and soundscapes offer up a variety of found material from the Bible to Bukowski, from Goethe to a slowed-down recording of Nico’s version of “Deutschland Über Alles” and a manifesto from Alternative für Deutschland. The second phase, “Crisis”, introduces a high but unspecified degree of military threat and general oppression. By now thoroughly won over, my only reservation was that the final phase ”resolves” matters into surrealism, as a military marshal intones a prolonged indictment against Scarlett Johansson before his body is borne around the space by a phalanx of gingham-frocked girls. No conclusions, then, but my initial intent of disliking the piece was totally, richly, gloriously thwarted.

Written for the Financial Times.