Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/theater/best-theater-europe-2018.html

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Edinburgh Fringe, Edinburgh

The ever-acute English writer Penelope Skinner turned her sharp eye on the #MeToo movement in this Edinburgh Fringe hit: a depiction of masculinity in free fall that finds its lone character, Roger, railing against a “gynocentric” world. Starting out as a genial, welcoming presence, the American actor Donald Sage Mackay’s shrewdly observed performance charts a slide toward psychosis that allows the actor to both charm and chill. The “angry Alan” of the title refers to an online activist-messiah who leads Roger toward real danger in a production, directed by its author, that will transfer to London’s Soho Theater in March. It’s a small play, with big impact.

Gielgud Theater, London

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Tony-winning 1970 musical made waves in its day for serving up a situation instead of a plot, and suggesting new directions for the American musical. In 2018, a production broke ground again, this time by reimagining its 35-year-old bachelor, Bobby, as the unmarried Bobbie, a Manhattan career woman, played with warmth and a quiet wisdom by Rosalie Craig. The strength of this version, directed by Marianne Elliott, is that you now can’t imagine “Company” done any other way, and a supporting cast that includes the proven Broadway legend Patti LuPone only further ices an already very rich cake.

National Theater, London

What’s in a name? Pretty much everything in the 1980 drama “Translations,” a play about place-naming that is one of the two certifiable masterpieces (“Faith Healer” is the other) from Brian Friel, the Irish dramatist. I’ve never seen so intimate a play in such a capacious setting as the gifted director Ian Rickson came up with for the National Theater’s largest space, the Olivier. Telling of a rural Irish community in 1830s County Donegal, the play spoke to a present-day climate itself obsessed with national identity and cultural autonomy: Mr. Rickson’s final visual coup haunts me still.

Almeida Theater, London

Robert Icke has worked his transformative magic on Shakespeare (“Hamlet”), Schiller (“Mary Stuart”) and Chekhov (“Uncle Vanya”), but his reappraisal of Ibsen’s darkest play just may represent this English director’s finest achievement to date. Using his own adaptation, the modern-dress production was performed with the houselights often up, and coupled the labyrinthine moral and sexual byways of Ibsen’s wounding original with a meta-theatrical commentary on the playwright’s own life. The production finished earlier this month, but Icke’s eye on the canon continues: He will next direct Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” for Theater Basel in Switzerland.

National Theater, London

Nearly 20 plays by David Hare have received their premieres at London’s flagship theater, so it is doubly astonishing that his latest, “I’m Not Running,” seems quite so clumsy. Set against the cut-and-thrust of contemporary politics while shifting back and forth in time, the play has distressingly little of import to say, and Mr. Hare’s gift for writing women’s parts hasn’t extended to the doctor Pauline Gibson, who becomes a single-issue politico; the fine actress Siân Brooke (“Sherlock”) is wasted in the role. Still, Mr. Hare’s busy workload means this misfire may soon be forgotten: His own Ibsen rewrite, “Peter Gynt,” is on the National’s schedule for 2019.

Avignon Festival

Milo Rau, the new director of the NTGent theater in Belgium, went from strength to strength in 2018. Before opening his first season in Ghent, he unveiled “La Reprise — Histoire(s) du Théâtre (I).” Inspired by the real story of Ihsane Jahfi, a gay man who was beaten to death in 2012, this meticulously realized production was the sensation of the Avignon Festival. By combining a recreation of his team’s research into the events with a re-enactment of the crime, Mr. Rau managed to get to the heart of its senseless brutality while questioning our experience of it as audience members.

Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, Paris

Theater makers are increasingly engaging with France’s colonial past, and “Saigon” led the way in 2018. Caroline Guiela Nguyen, who is of Vietnamese descent, wrote, directed and acted in this affecting saga, which moves back and forth between Vietnam and Paris. The story starts in 1956, as the last French troops prepare to leave what was then French Indochina, and covers three decades of family history and exile. Performed in a mix of French and Vietnamese, the production delicately explored the complex identities born of colonial rule, all from the setting of a family-run restaurant.

Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, Paris

Vanessa Larré wasn’t the first director to tackle Virginie Despentes’s 2006 memoir, but she delivered the right production at the right time. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, her polyphonic staging — led by three women — reaffirmed the radical power of Ms. Despentes’s prescient writing. Ms. Larré stripped away the aura of scandal that is still often associated with an author who reclaimed her body after being raped by prostituting herself, and who has always refused to be victimized. “King Kong Theory” celebrated Ms. Despentes as an important writer and thinker — as she should be.

Théâtre de la Colline, Paris

French theater’s contribution to the 50th anniversary of the Paris uprisings of May 1968 was muted, but Wajdi Mouawad’s “Notre Innocence” (“Our Innocence”) captured a young generation’s ambivalence toward the legacy of that revolutionary spring. In it, the Lebanese-Canadian director of the Théâtre de la Colline cast 18 students from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art as an arresting chorus. They spoke as one, with derisive force, of the world they have inherited, and pulled no punches when portraying the know-it-all generation of ’68. Some audience members walked out, and in some ways, the hopelessness of the text prefigured the social unrest that has gripped France at the tail end of 2018.

Théâtre de la Colline, Paris

Subtlety is not Vincent Macaigne’s strong suit. The French playwright and director, 38, threw every possible special effect at the audience in “Je Suis un Pays” (“I Am a Country”), an exhausting, overblown postapocalyptic tale. Humanity has just been wiped out when the play starts, but there’s only so much smoke, fake blood and ear-piercing screams one can take before pining for another nuclear catastrophe. Mr. Macaigne has done better in the past when tackling the work of other playwrights: He would do well to set aside the self-indulgent excess of “Je Suis un Pays” and do less, but better.

Schaubühne, Berlin

On a nearly bare stage, the French writer Édouard Louis’s 2016 autobiographical novel about a sexual assault and its aftermath comes vividly to life through a series of crisp monologues and maddening interrogations, in an adaptation by the director Thomas Ostermeier. Laurenz Laufenberg and Renato Schuch give blistering performances as victim and perpetrator, and Mr. Ostermeier provokes them to dig deep into their characters’ anguish, fury, cowardice and shame. In terms of dramatic focus and emotional directness, this engrossing stage translation of a novel invites comparisons to the work of Simon McBurney, the English director whose emotionally raw production of Stefan Zweig’s “Beware of Pity” is also in repertory at the Schaubühne.

Residenztheater, Munich

Ivica Buljan’s production of “The Balcony,” an involving and inventive version of Jean Genet’s play on the Residenztheater Munich’s smaller Marstall stage, was the year’s most exciting chamber production. Set amid an assemblage of refrigerators and freezers, Genet’s sinister parable about sexual fantasies gratified in a brothel as revolution rages in the streets of an unnamed city is famously difficult to stage, but Mr. Buljan’s energetic production works fiendishly well thanks to the wild, impassioned performances of a musically gifted cast. It features a heavy dose of full frontal male nudity, a throaty rendition of “The Internationale” around a burning oil barrel and a cheeky recreation of the scene in Rubin Östlund’s 2017 Palme d’Or-winning film, “The Square,” when a genteel dinner is hijacked by a rogue performance artist.

Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich

The Münchner Kammerspiele kicked off its current season with the young director Christopher Rüping’s monumental and memorable “Dionysos Stadt,” a 10-hour production inspired by the works of Aeschylus, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. Seven of the ensemble theater’s committed actors (and a musician) shoulder this epic undertaking, which follows the trajectory of Greek myth from Prometheus’ defiance of the gods to the blood-soaked family saga of “The Oresteia,” reimagined as a sitcom with a cast of kooky characters. It is Mr. Rüping’s most ambitious undertaking to date, and a high point of Matthias Lilenthal’s tenure as this venerable company’s artistic director.

Schauspiel Stuttgart, Stuttgart

The centerpiece of Armin Petras’s final season leading the Schauspiel Stuttgart was a devastating staging of “King Lear” from the director Claus Peymann that was this year’s finest Shakespeare production in German. Mr. Peymann, who recently stepped down as artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, presided over a restrained and focused performance that allowed the actors to shine in the play’s overpowering darkness. Martin Schwab’s bitter and irascible Lear avoided melodramatic gestures, letting us see the mad king’s distress in a decidedly unheroic fashion. Lea Ruckpaul did double duty as Cordelia and the Fool, imbuing both roles with tenderness and vulnerability. An unsentimental and sobering “Lear” of rare dramatic purity.

Schauspiel Stuttgart, Stuttgart

As always, a number of plays had me squirming in my chair wondering how long the agony could last. There’s only one, however, I wish I could un-see: Kay Voges’s “Das 1. Evangelium,” which originated at the Schauspiel Stuttgart and later traveled to the Volksbühne in Berlin. This migraine-inducing romp through the New Testament combined pseudo-intellectualism with high camp on a constantly rotating stage. Mr. Voges and his team went all out for this garishly lit and intricately choreographed show, which follows the dysfunctional shoot of a biblical film. It doesn’t take long for the novelty of the brightly colored set pieces to wear off and for boredom to set in: “Das 1. Evangelium” is too indulgent and puerile to even cause offense.