ARTicles vol.5 i.2a: Angels on Stage

Wings of Desire is an international collaboration between the A.R.T. and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Netherlands’ foremost theatre company. The production opened in Amsterdam in early October, and tours the Netherlands and Belgium before arriving at the A.R.T. Gideon Lester, the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director, translated the German screenplay of Wings of Desire (Himmel uber Berlin) into English and was a dramaturg on the production. ARTicles caught up with him shortly after he returned from Amsterdam and the Dutch premiere.

Q: Wings of Desire is arguably one of the greatest films of the late twentieth century. Why adapt it for the stage?

Gideon Lester: The idea came from Ola Mafaalani, the production’s Syrian-born director, who I think is one of Europe’s most exciting young theatre makers. Robert Woodruff had seen her work and invited her to direct a project at the A.R.T., and Ola’s first suggestion was an adaptation of Wings of Desire. For several years she has been incorporating angels into her productions; her Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Macbeth all featured angels who bore silent witness to the unfolding narratives, powerless to affect their tragic outcome. One day Ola’s dramaturg gave her the screenplay of Wings of Desire and Ola realized that her use of angels had been inspired by the film, which she had seen when it was released in 1987 but which she had more or less forgotten. We were very excited by the idea, though there were obviously huge challenges to be faced in the adaptation process.

Q: What kind of challenges?

G.L.: First, there are profound differences between the construction of stage plays and screenplays. Filmmakers have many narrative and compositional devises at their disposal that are unavailable in the theatre; jump cuts, close ups, subjective camera shots, montage, and so on. One of the principal subjects of Wings of Desire is film itself – it’s an example of what you might call self-conscious cinema. Peter Falk is in Berlin to make a historical movie, and the screenplay reflects on the way that film reconstructs and reconstitutes history. There is also something self-consciously cinematic in the way the camera appears to watch the world from an angel’s perspective – for example, the film shifts from black-and-white while Damiel is an angel to color when he becomes human. It wasn’t at all obvious at first how those ideas could be translated to the stage, or even if they should be. Second, Wings of Desire is a product of a very particular place and time – Berlin during the 1980s, while the city was divided by the Wall. We now live in a radically different world, whose identity was to a considerable extent shaped by the demolition of that Wall. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t have made much sense to recreate that environment on stage, because the context is so different. If you want to see Berlin in the 80s, watch the movie – it does it much better than the theatre can. So we knew from the onset that, if Wings of Desire were to succeed in the theatre, it would need to take on a new artistic existence. The adaptation process would need to be very thorough; this was never going to be about attempting to reproduce the film on stage.

Q: How did you proceed with the adaptation?

G.L.: The process took well over a year, and we’re probably not finished yet; the version performed at the A.R.T. will be somewhat different from the show in Amsterdam, even though most of the cast will be the same. We began by compiling a literal translation into Dutch and English of the German screenplay, camera angles and all. That original document was about three hundred pages long, and our current script is just over forty pages, which shows you how far we’ve come! The adaptation has taken many turns; for a long while we thought that the production might be set in New York City. There’s a dreadful coincidence in the fact that the wound of 9/11 was inflicted exactly at the birthplace of modern America, on the site of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan. We imagined that the angels might have watched its development from a tiny, hardscrabble trading settlement to one of the greatest twenty-first century metropolises; the Dutch/American nature of the co-production made the historical nexus seem very attractive for a while. But we eventually abandoned it, along with several other bad ideas! The final version is remarkably simple, and stays very faithful to the language of the screenplay. In theatre you often travel a very long road to return to your starting place.

Q: If not in Berlin, where is the production set?

G.L.: On the stage – or rather, in the theatre, where the audience and the actors sit together and look at each other. Ola’s work is never about illusion or pretence; what you see is what you get. She doesn’t like her actors to pretend to be other people – she introduces them to the audience as themselves. The set doesn’t represent anything, it’s exactly what it looks like – a snack bar where life unfolds in real time, where the men and women on stage eat, drink coffee, smoke, and so on. A glorious trapeze artist performs over their heads, two musicians are playing to one side, from time to time a well-known newsreader reads bulletins of today’s actual news, but all those people, all those elements, are no more and no less than what they seem to be. Everyone and everything is real and tangible, which I think makes the production beautifully straightforward and alive. It’s a great counterpart to Wenders’ film, which is so much about the mundane details of daily life in Berlin – the real Berlin where the movie was shot, not a mockup on a Hollywood sound stage. There’s no make-believe involved in either the film or the theatre, except for the one, central make-believe that the action is being observed by angels. And since everything around them is so real, the angels are thrown into a kind of high relief, which makes their presence very moving. I think at heart we’d all like to believe that our lives are being watched, and perhaps thereby given some meaning, by silent, compassionate observers.

Q: You mentioned that the production will be somewhat different at the A.R.T. than it was in Europe. Can you give an example?

G.L.: The most obvious difference will be in the language. The Dutch are almost all perfectly fluent in English, which meant that in Amsterdam the actors could effortlessly switch between the two languages, confident that the audience would understand them in both. Obviously that’s not the case in Boston, so we’ll use Dutch only very sparingly, mainly for its musical quality. But the international quality is very important to the production, and we’ll have to find ways to enhance it in the A.R.T. version.

Q: Why is it important?

G.L.: Both the film and the production are about boundaries and divisions, and the great effort one person has to make to achieve real contact with another. In the film those boundaries were exemplified by the Berlin Wall; when Damiel becomes human, he does so by passing through the Wall itself. The international aspect of the stage version creates a different kind of division, or you could say a bridge, between Europe and the States. When I watched the opening night performance in Amsterdam, I realized that Ola is also exploring the division between the stage and the audience – indeed the production creates a kind of bridge there too, although I don’t want to give too much away.

Q: You translated the screenplay into English. Can you talk about the language of the film?

G.L.: It contains two very different modes of language. Much of the dialogue in the film was improvised, and many scenes – particularly those involving Peter Falk – have a very conversational quality. But Wenders also collaborated with the great Austrian poet and playwright Peter Handke, who wrote the inner thoughts of Marion, the trapeze artist, as well as several of the angels’ scenes, the monologues of Homer, the mysterious ancient poet, and Damiel’s poem “When the child was a child” that recurs throughout the film as a kind of chorus. Handke’s language is elliptical and poetic, and is almost impossible to render directly in English. He’s one of the greatest writers of the contemporary stage, but we almost never see his work performed in the States because the language is so difficult. One of the collateral pleasures of Wings of Desire is that we’re presenting Handke at the A.R.T. for the first time.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.

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