Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin by Olivia Landry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin by Olivia Landry S.E. Jackson Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin. By Olivia Landry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 236. Cloth $56.25. ISBN 978-1487507695. eBook $56.26. ISBN 978-1487536763. Deeply researched and methodologically sophisticated, Olivia Landry's Theatre of Anger is an essential contribution to scholarship on contemporary German theater, culture, and politics. The book situates a compelling history of twenty-first-century postmigrant theater in discourses of anger to foreground the active political force of a new type of theater that Landry dubs "theatre of anger." Descriptions of theatrical events are rich with detail and brought to life with attention to mise-en-scène, performance practices, and reception, in addition to careful engagement and close reading of dramatic texts and their productions. Landry also skillfully interweaves more encompassing histories of German politics and postmigrant theater. The book will be informative for those not already familiar with its material and illuminating for those who are because compact accounts of social and political contexts are connected to original analyses of productions. Landry establishes the mutually influential exchange between theater and milieu—particularly in Germany where theater has a profound connection to cultural and political developments—and she convincingly demonstrates how artist-activists in the theater of anger have asserted real political power. As she explains in the introduction, Landry initially aimed to write a more comprehensive history of postmigrant theater (19). She developed the category "theatre of anger" through years of personal observation in Berlin theaters and critical study of the postmigrant dramatic and performance works she encountered. This narrowed focus proved incisive as it led her to establish a critical framework of anger and to highlight the political productivity of a movement led by minoritized Germans outside of, within, and against powerful German theater institutions. In her first chapter, Landry rereads histories of anger from Aristotle, through Kant and Lessing, and to [End Page 636] the present day informed by contemporary feminist thinkers (including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Sara Ahmed) who complicate dominant, exclusive theories of anger through critical race and gender studies. Landry thus demonstrates how the theater of anger claims the powerful and privileged status of legitimate anger for minoritized citizens. As Landry shows, legitimate anger has historically been reserved for those in positions of power, while minoritized individuals are stigmatized as pathologically angry and socially conditioned to internalize rage in self-destructive ways. Opposing this, the theater of anger draws on a future-oriented and outwardly directed rage that calls out injustice and for change. Importantly, Landry argues, this anger is radical; it is aimed at institutions and social structures that cause and perpetuate injustice. Carefully intertwining the intellectual history of anger with the aesthetics and politics of theater in Germany, Landry directs readers through the introduction and first chapter into the following content. In chapter 2, she then establishes more immediate historical contexts by identifying the prominent activist network Kanack Attack as "a notable precursor to the theatre of anger" (20) and using their work as a bridge between the postmigrant theater of the 2010s and the social and political contexts of migration and integration debates in the 1990s. This provides essential background for the emergence of Desintegration discourses and postmigrant theater. The next two chapters move chronologically through paired examples of the literary, production, and performance practices that define the theater of anger. In chapter 3 Landry examines how claiming anger is particularly fraught for Muslim Germans due to the weaponization of anger and/as violence against Muslims in the press and in conservative political rhetoric. Rather than turning away from anger, and thus abandoning its political potential, artists in the theater of anger take the accusation head on and refuse to have the power of rage turned against them. Chapter 4 explores how the documentary theater of anger asserts relevance and impact by engaging with real-world events and media. Landry shows that postmigrant artist-activists invested in documentary forms of theater as worldwide public protest movements such as the Arab Spring emerged in the twenty-first century, allowing the theater...