‘Talent Is the Ability to Be in the Present’: Gestalt Therapy and George Tabori's Early Theatre Practice

Abstract

The Jewish-German-Hungarian director and playwright George Tabori has been one of the prominent figures of German-speaking theatre over the past thirty years. Outside Germany, Tabori is best known as the author of provocative Holocaust drama, such as The Cannibals (1968) and Mein Kampf (1987). But as a director Tabori has produced an equally impressive body of work, with ground-breaking productions of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Kafka. Tabori's promotion of theatre as therapy and his unusual actor-centred approach to rehearsal earned his work a ‘somewhat dubious’ reputation of being closely related to psychotherapeutic activity. In this article, Antje Diedrich seeks to clarify the extent to which there are concrete intersections and parallels of thought between Gestalt therapy and Tabori's early theatre practice. She identifies the influence of works by Frederick S. Perls and John O. Stevens on Tabori's discourse on acting and rehearsal practice, and concludes with a discussion of Sigmunds Freude (1975), a production based on protocols of Gestalt therapeutic sessions by Frederick S. Perls. Antje Diedrich works as a Lecturer in European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College in London. She has completed a PhD thesis about George Tabori's theatre practice and is currently working on further articles about Tabori's work as a director and playwright.