The revival is dead: Is this something else? Or, holding onto Anta Helena Recke’s MITTELREICH as a work of art

Abstract

In 2017, Anta Helena Recke restaged the production of MITTELREICH on which she had previously been employed as the assistant director, with one crucial difference: the entire cast, orchestra and creative team were now Black. This action, which she named a Schwarzkopie (‘black copy’), exposed a raft of material racial inequalities within the European theatre industry and brought about a more abstract inquiry into the very idea of a theatrical copy. In this article I bring some of the material and theoretical consequences of Recke’s production in direct conversation with McKenzie Wark’s thought experiments on finding, after Marx, a new language for the contemporary modes of production. Wark’s insistence on historical materialism provides a helpful framing for uncovering the specific value(s) of Recke’s staging and allows a discussion on class relations to enter a hitherto stymied debate around identity politics in European theatre.