THE KITCHEN

Year & Context

1990 · Premiere 29 November

Opening Production Theaterhaus Düsseldorf

About the Production

“For Shakespeare the whole world may have been a stage, but for me it is a kitchen, where people come and go and cannot stay long enough to understand one another, and where friendship, love and enmity are forgotten as quickly as they arise.”

— Arnold Wesker

Arnold Wesker wrote that in 1961 – and meant far more than a kitchen. The large restaurant kitchen in which his play unfolds is both setting and symbol: a workplace that wears people down, sets them against one another, yet cannot stop them from loving, quarrelling and dreaming. In 1990, after its theatrical journeys into the early twentieth century (“The Mechanical Bauhaus Stage”, 1987) and the early eighteenth (“The Baroque Mask Stage”, 1989), Theater der Klänge turned to the immediate present. A play by a living author, addressing the social reality of contemporary life. “Performance is what counts” – that sentence could just as easily have been coined in 1990.

The adaptation of Erich Fried’s German translation from the 1960s – written by J.U. Lensing and authorised by Wesker – transposed the material into a contemporary West German kitchen setting. But the form was not naturalistic reproduction. The basic structure of the play – orders called, confirmed and executed, twelve cooks serving seven waitresses, each at a spatially defined station – yielded, when multiple waitresses placed orders simultaneously, a rhythmic pattern of speech and calls. Theater der Klänge set this to music: as a composition of rhythm and dynamics, making the mechanical character of this working world plainly visible. The stage did not actually cook. The waitresses carried empty plates. The cooks went through the motions. The simulation was worked out in every detail.

“The Kitchen” was the third production of Theater der Klänge – and thus the conclusion of a long apprenticeship, with an ensemble grown to thirty performers: musicians, dancers, actors and artists. The premiere took place on 29 November 1990 at the Theaterhaus Düsseldorf. The production also marks the end of the semi-professional phase of Theater der Klänge. After the run at the Theaterhaus Düsseldorf, the ensemble moved into the new rehearsal stage at Winkelsfelderstraße in Düsseldorf – signalling the beginning of the company’s fully professional work.

Funded by: City of Düsseldorf, Land North Rhine-Westphalia, Fonds darstellende Künste