Berlin has only two large-scale receiving theatres (currently hosting touring productions of Ghost and Grease respectively), but half a dozen or more top-flight producing houses. This may or may not relate to a German theatre culture which seems to value engagement much more than escapism. This year’s Theatertreffen festival, just ended, has been chock-full of ideas; indeed, I have sometimes wondered whether its selection panel perhaps values the ideas themselves above their theatrical execution. But it has to be admitted that, even when being infuriated, I have been very definite and focused on what it was that was infuriating me.

The panel selected a core presentation of the ten outstanding productions from the German-speaking world over the past twelve months. This year these have included shows from Germany, Switzerland, Austria... and Manchester, where Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Rückkehr nach Reims / Returning To Reims premièred at that city’s International Festival before returning to repertoire in Ostermeier’s Schaubühne in Berlin. Another production from the capital was Frank Castorf’s Faust, perhaps overshadowed by the recent ouster after mere months of his successor Chris Dercon from the helm of the Volksbühne: the area around festival centre the Festspiele was plastered with stickers proclaiming unmercifully “Cheerio Chris” and “Frank come home”.

I chose the words “productions from the German-speaking world” carefully. Rückkehr nach Reims was presented here in both English and principally-German performances, and Die Odyssee from Hamburg’s Thalia Theater was in a gobbledegook based largely on Swedish. Thomas Niehaus and Paul Schröder play Odysseus’ sons Telemachus and Telegonos, meeting for the first time at his funeral and forced to negotiate relationships with each other and with the father they never knew (represented by a large photo of Kirk Douglas) as they recount their interpretations of his odyssey. In practice, though, this takes the form of conjuring, music, visual and physical comedy in the context of a beautifully evolving double-act set-up. I was incredulous that Antú Romero Nunes’ production saw a handful of walkouts: I can only attribute them to an excessively Teutonic view that this was altogether too much fun. (****)

The same could not be said of either Am Königsweg from the SchauSpielHaus Hamburg or Theater Basel’s Woyzeck. The former, a three-and-a-half-hour production by Falk Richter of a text by Elfriede Jelinek, could have been designed to encapsulate everything about German Regietheater that riles Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. The text muses on the figure of the King, the brutal, half-insane, arbitrary absolute ruler of whom the current exemplar is explicitly Donald Trump, and the ways in which our society does not just enable his emergence but actively desires him in our own unrepentant stupidity. The action, in best “post-dramatic” fashion, is all but random, including in this case a stuffed tiger, Mr Punch in an auditorium box and a variant on Chaplin’s Great Dictator balloon-globe routine. Ulrich Rasche’s Woyzeck also topped three hours... how, with such a fragmentary text? By BELLOWING! IT! VERY! SLOWLY! I swear that at one point there was a pause of several seconds between “WOY-!” and “-ZECK!” Rather than actual enactment, characters appeared on a huge, ever-revolving plate canted at various angles both to the audience and to the horizontal; at several points the angle was so crazy that actors had to be tethered by safety lines. The whole was accompanied by remorseless musical accompaniment. Rasche’s intention was presumably to convey to us the brutality and craziness of Woyzeck’s own inner world under unforgiving military and dietary regimes; however, in dramatic terms, the best way to convey torture is probably not to commit it. Just a thought. (** each)

The Theatertreffen also offers a full programme of discussions, talks and a supplementary batch of international performances under the banner Shifting Perspectives. Here, too, engagement was at the forefront, asking the questions “who do we want to speak to, and how?” In Solar: A Meltdown, Singaporean Ho Rui An lectured (in English) on the iconography of the European colonist and their relationship to the tropical sun and to sweat, with clever and revelatory illustrations in video clips ranging from the “Getting To Know You” sequence of The King And I to 1970s British TV sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum! In Chombotrope, the Jitta Collective (based between Nairobi and Köln) gradually built a dance-based portrait of modern Africa and two-way cultural appropriation in which hip-hop deck work clashed with talking drum playing, militarist marching with traditional gumboot dancing. (**** each)

The most impressive production was one for which I only obtained a ticket at the last minute, and half the story of which I am missing. For I did not see at Theatertreffen 2016 the production of Josef Bierbichler’s novel Mittelreich, its chronicle of three generations of rural Bavarian innkeepers and musings upon traditional values and how they are, or we imagine they are, disrupted by incomers. Anta Helena Recke for the Münchner Kammerspiele has reproduced that beautiful staging scrupulously, complete with its passages of classical oratorio, but with one significant difference: everyone we see – actors, musicians, choir – is a person of colour. Without changing a word, it relocates the work’s themes in contemporary Germany to stunning effect. (*****)

Written for the Financial Times.